


2.26 Apparition

by William_Easley



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Dimensions, Alternate Timelines, F/F, Ghosts, Halloween
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2019-01-17 07:10:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12360303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/William_Easley/pseuds/William_Easley
Summary: Halloween, 2014, and the fifteen-year-old Mystery Twins are too old for trick-or-treating--but the exact right age for a Halloween dance at their high school. Of course, there's the choice of the exact perfect costumes . . . not too silly . . . not too scary . . . a little sexy . . . um, and not haunted would be nice.





	2.26 Apparition

**Author's Note:**

> I do not own Gravity Falls or its characters, the property of the Walt Disney Company and Alex Hirsch. I write only for fun, because I love Alex Hirsch's creation and his people and, I hope, to entertain other fans; I make no money from my fanfictions.

**Apparition**

**by William Easley**

**(October 25-31, 2014)**

* * *

 

**1 Masquerade**

Halloween lay on the horizon, like a ghost ship full of pirates and candy!

So what if fifteen-year-olds were too big for trick-or-treating? They definitely were not too old, Mabel knew, for a costume party—and how cool was it that on Halloween evening, which fell on a Friday night, the high school was hosting a GOAT Halloween masquerade dance?

She and Dipper had missed it the previous year—freshmen suffered certain restrictions, and one of them was the number of dances they could attend, especially the ones that involved dressing up in potentially hot costumes, as in costumes guaranteed to make the wearers look fire! Ah, but as sophomores, they had the freedom to go and dance their heads off while looking totally gooch!

Mabel had picked up some slang that Dipper didn't always catch. She'd been hanging out with a particularly verbal set of friends.

Anyway, she was determined to go.

If she could overcome a few problems. The first had been Dipper's reluctance. "I'm just not that into dancing," he'd complained. "I mean, Wendy's six hundred miles away, and every time I go to a dance and hang out with a girl, you always tell her all about it and she pretends to be mad at me, and—"

Mabel punched his arm. "It's just _teasing_ , Broford! That's how you know she likes you, duh!"

Rubbing his arm, Dipper muttered, "Yeah, right, like when you told her about Charmaine and made it sound like she and I had some kind of hot French thing going on between us! Then when Wendy asked me about it, I panicked and hyperventilated and felt like an idiot! I'd rather just sit it out."

"Yeah," Mabel said, "but Wendy's going to dances and junk! With Devlin! And you're not worried about that!"

"He's not interested in her," Dipper said. "Or any girl. She told us that. She just sort of feels sorry for him 'cause he's always so lonely."

"Danger! Danger!" Mabel said, waving her arms wildly. "Danger, Dipper Pines!"

"You have to stop watching the Retro Channel," Dipper complained. "You are not a robot."

Mabel flopped down on the floor of his room, sitting with her arms crossed and leaning against his door. "Look, if Wendy's going to dances, she's dancing with a guy or two! And how's she gonna feel knowing you're too chicken to have a perfectly casual dance with a perfectly Platonic girl—that's right, isn't it? Or is it Plutonic?"

"Platonic," Dipper said, trying without success to get back to his psych homework. "Plutonic is hellish, I think."

"Ooh la-la!" Mabel said, wagging her eyebrows. "A hot chick, huh?"

"I . . . don't think people even say that any more," Dipper told her.

Dipper proved unreasonably resistant. And unusually so, too. It took Mabel all Friday night and part of Saturday to bring him around—it was a bit of a siege. "Come on," she had moaned on Saturday morning. "If you can't go, I can't go!"

"Sure, you can," Dipper had said over breakfast.

Their mom asked, "Go where?"

"To the Halloween _da-ance_!" Mabel groaned, collapsing forward onto the table, jarring her orange-juice glass so it almost fell off the edge. Face-down, she mourned, "My life is _over_!"

Dad, from behind his newspaper—actually his tablet, because he got electronic delivery—said, "Go to the dance, Mason."

"I don't want to," Dipper complained.

"Go to chaperone your sister," Dad said.

Mabel didn't raise her head, but whined, "Aw, Dad!"

"That's _why_ I don't want to go," Dipper pointed out reasonably.

"And sometimes we do things we don't want to do because they're the right thing to do," Dad said. "I seem to remember your saying that once."

"Fine," Dipper said with a sigh. "I'll go."

"You're the GOAT!" Mabel yelled, jumping up to hug him.

" _What_ did you call your brother?" Mom asked, turning from the sink with a scowl and with both hands on her hips. "After he was nice enough—"

"Mom," Dipper said, "it's an acronym. It means 'greatest of all time.'"

"Teen talk, dear," Dad said.

"I will never understand them," Mom muttered.

"Thank heavens for small favors, darling," Dad said.

Once Fortress Dipper had fallen, Mabel's next challenge was brainstorming tope costumes.

"Tope?" Dipper asked. "That's a new one."

"Grenda uses it all the time in her texts," Mabel said. "Tope. Totes dope. I think she got it from Marius."

"Like a virus."

Mabel ignored that and bent over scattered sheets of paper, on which she slashed quick sketches, only to discard each one immediately with a "Nope, not tope enough."

Gone were the days when they could be PB & J, or mustard and ketchup, or cute twin kitty-cats.

Dipper turned down a few ideas: No Ghost Harassers, because "You know what would happen. We'd show up, and so would a ghost!"

No knight and princess—Dipper vetoed that: "Corny and anyhow, you know—Pinecest!" That made Mabel wince. She recalled all too well the unfortunate websurfing she'd done the time the Mystery Twins were in the comic-book convention dimension, where Gravity Falls was not so much a place as a TV cartoon show.

Nothing clicked. Later that afternoon, they were sitting on the swings of their old swing-set in the backyard of their house—which they were due to vacate in January, because they'd be moving down the street to the cul-de-sac and the bigger house that Mom and Dad had decided to buy. Mabel was already getting nostalgic about leaving the old place behind, though Dipper pointed out they could walk down from the new one in about three minutes to visit anytime they wanted.

Mabel let herself sort of rock back and forth, the chains on her swing creaking a little. "Hmm. We could go as each other, like we did at the Fourth of July to fool Wendy's dad!"

Dipper gave her a stony stare. "And what? I'd dance with _guys_? No, thanks!"

"C'mon," Mabel said, and Dipper couldn't tell whether she was teasing or serious. "Lots of girls think that guys who cross-dress are _cute_!"

" _Nobody_ thinks I'm cute," Dipper said with finality.

"Wrong-o!" Mabel pronounced. "Candy always thought you were! And Wendy says you're cute! Especially when you're all scratched up with a black eye and bleeding from your nose!"

Dipper nearly fell out of his swing. "What!"

"She told me," Mabel insisted. "Back in Weirdmageddon, you and her had this car wreck or some deal, and you got all banged and bruised up. She said it was all she could do not to throw her arms around you when she saw you scratched up and bleeding!"

"Because she banged her head," Dipper said. "She wasn't attracted to me—she was just loopy! I mean why would any girl like a guy because he was bleeding?"

"Part vampire?" Mabel suggested. "Has she ever suck—"

"Shut up!"

Mabel dropped it. Finally, though, she said, "Time travelers!"

"Huh?" Dipper asked.

"Let's go as time travelers! Somebody told Anne, and she told Daisy, and she told Martina, and she told me, that there's this theatrical costume place that's going out of business and selling stuff at ridiculously cheap prices! Let's go get some outfits from the 1950s or some deal, like we did for Grunkle Stan's nostalgia dance! We'll go as people coming from the past!"

"Huh," Dipper said, this time without the question mark. "Sounds OK. I guess."

"You gotta come with me!" Mabel insisted. "Sizes! And we have to get just the right look!"

Dipper stopped protesting. It had never worked before.

The shop was in Oakland, and Dad—whom Mabel could talk into anything—drove them over. "Should I stand by with the credit card?" he asked.

"You got it!" Mabel shot back. "C'mon, Brobro—CHARRRGGE!"

Key Light Costumes had been in business for nearly a hundred years, and now it was closing—well, in this location, because the building had been purchased and was slated for destruction to build another mall. The manager was wandering around and told Dad that they would be relocating to a spot nearer CCA and Berkeley ("We cater to college and community theaters") soon.

Meanwhile, Mabel was leading Dipper up one aisle and down another, skirting other bargain-hunters. "How 'bout a sexy nurse and doctor?"

"That would be a no," Dipper said.

"You could be the nurse!"

"That would be a _big_ no."

"Oh, look! Army uniforms from, like, World War II! We could be a couple of buck privates!"

"Women couldn't serve in the regular Army back then."

"Shut up!"

Finally, Mabel found a vintage dress—bright red, made of layers of fringes and studded with glittery rhinestones, and cut short, ending above the knee. "What is this, and where has it been all my life?" she asked in excited tones.

Dipper read the label: "It's a flapper dress."

"Oh! I see!" Mabel said, fingering the soft material. Then she giggled. "I don't know what that means."

"It's a dress—" Dipper wrinkled his brow—"from the 1920s, I think. A flapper was a girl who liked dancing and partying—"

"Made for me!" Mabel pronounced.

A clerk came over and asked if they were finding what they needed. "Tell me about this!" Mabel said, holding up the dress, which was almost the right size for her.

"Oh," the clerk said, smiling. "That's an actual vintage piece. The owners picked that up years and years ago at an estate sale. It was made for a young woman in 1929, or maybe it was 1927, but never worn. And odd, but in all the time we've had it in the store, it's never once been rented. They say it's haunted."

"Go on!" Mabel said, laughing.

"Wait, what?" Dipper said.

The clerk shrugged. "It's just store folklore, that's all. I don't even know if it's true. But some girl's parents were supposed to have had that dress specially made for their daughter's sweet-sixteen party, but about a day before her birthday, she died tragically. I don't know how. Anyway, that's the story they tell us. But the dress is probably worth something just as an antique, and we're selling it for just twenty dollars."

" _Sold_!" Mabel said.

"Sis, I don't know—"

"You'll need some accessories," the clerk told Mabel. "The right shoes, and stockings, a feather boa would be good, and a sequined headband with an ostrich feather."

"And a mask! It's a masked dance!" Mabel said. "Wait, though, I'll make that myself."

"Mabel, if it's hau—"

"And my Brobro here will need a suit that's from the same time period!"

That turned out to be a Navy-blue blazer, the lapels outlined with gold cording, a high-collared white shirt, a repp tie (crimson, white, and Navy), white trousers and white shoes, and—a flat-topped straw boater hat. "That's the Gatsby," the clerk said. "The hat fits, but the jacket and trousers are a tad large on you—"

"No worries!" Mabel said. "I'm a wiz at the sewing machine! We'll take _everything_!"

Even at sale prices, it mounted up, and Dad rolled his eyes as he handed over the plastic. On the way home, Mabel bounced in the back seat next to Dipper, bubbling over with plans for alterations and enhancements. "You gotta take a picture of me to send to Teek!" she told Dipper. "Oh, man, I wish Teek could come down!"

"I wish Wendy could," Dipper said.

After they got home, they even tried, but of course it was out of the question—Teek's parents weren't about to let their sixteen-year-old go traipsing six hundred miles down to California just for a dance, and Wendy sorrowfully said she was too busy with school and with helping Soos get the Shack in shape for the December closing to make the trip. But she, too, insisted, "Post a photo, man! I wanna see you and Mabes togged out!"

Mabel spent the rest of that Saturday afternoon and evening on her dress, which she tucked here and let out there, subtly adjusting the shoulder straps. Then she put everything on—the stockings were black fishnets, and Dipper said, "Well, it's kinda retro sexy, I guess." But then he cautioned, "Better take those fishnets in your purse and put them on once we get to the dance. If Mom and Dad see them—"

" _Way_ ahead of you, Broseph," Mabel said. "I've got some plain black opaques to wear for the trip into school, and then I'll emerge like a butterfly from the cocoon of the girls' room in the gym."

"O-kayyy…."

Dipper tried on his own outfit, under fruitless protest. Mabel decided that the blazer could stand a little dart in the back. Trousers needed shortening and hemming. Everything else worked, though Dipper complained that he didn't like the straw hat. "Dorky."

"Well, you can't wear Wendy's _trapper's_ hat to the dance," Mabel told him firmly. "Not in period. Besides, dorky looks good on you. Oh, and I'll make us those eye masks—what do you call 'em?"

"Domino masks," Dipper said.

"Yeah, them. I'll make them out of black silk. Hey, are you gonna ask anybody? 'Cause I don't think Martina's got a date since she broke up with Cliff—"

"I'll go stag," Dipper said.

"Me, too. Except staggette," Mabel told him. "I like it better that way, 'cause you can have lots of partners! Let's do the first dance together."

"We always do," Dipper said. _And then half the time I just stand against the wall and watch for the next three hours._ But he knew Mabel—she'd haul over at least three girls during the night, and he'd ask them to dance, and he'd feel all weird and awkward and the girls would be glad when the music ended—but that was part of the Great American High School Experience, he supposed.

Mabel turned in a little late that Saturday night. She made her nightly phone call to Soos, who took his phone out to the sty behind the Shack, and she said her ritual goodnights to Widdles and Waddles—Widdles now rapidly gaining weight and getting to be nearly as large as her father—and then, before hanging up, she sang a little lullaby for Little Soos, who now could say "Maybay!"

It had been a crowded day, and she fell asleep at 10:50.

And woke, coming from a dream about Aoshima the Flying, uh, dolphin-thingie, to full wakefulness in a heartbeat.

"Dipper?" she asked in a whisper.

Something tugged on her coverlet and sheet.

"Dipper, cut that out," she grumbled, turning on the light.

He wasn't there.

But something—something she could not see—was at the foot of the bed. The cover and sheet pulled from her grasp and crept down slowly, slowly, uncovering her. They fell into the floor with a soft _flump!_

"Who's there?" Mabel asked, sitting up in bed. She wasn't scared—just curious.

Then—the sheet rose from the floor where it had fallen. It took on the classic form of a shrouded ghost, a figure about Mabel's height. It might have been a little more frightening had Mabel's sheets not been covered with images of Hiya Kitty (Mom had never got out of the habit of buying them, though Mabel's infatuation with them had ended the year she turned eight). However, kitty-decorated or not, it definitely looked like a ghostly manifestation.

"I'm sorry," Mabel said, "you've got the wrong bedroom. You might do better in another house. My brother and I are sort of used to ghosts—oh!"

Because this ghost wasn't trying to terrify her. It wasn't even menacing, not remotely.

It did not seem to want to frighten her. Instead, it stood there and, in a heartbroken way and quite softly, its shoulders heaving, it wept.

Mabel slipped out of bed. "Wait here."

She crossed the hall and opened Dipper's bedroom door, without knocking. She always did, though she sometimes saw things she wished she could unsee. "Hey, Dip?"

"Hmmh? Wha'? Mabel? Bad dream?"

"No," she said. "But I think you ought to come and see this."

Dipper didn't argue, but rolled off his bed and stood up. "What?"

"Put on some pants. You don't want to come in in your tighty whities."

"Gah." But he pulled on his jeans. "What is it?"

"Come and see."

They padded barefoot into Mabel's bedroom, and she flicked on the lights.

"What am I supposed to look at?" Dipper asked.

The sheet lay in a pile on the floor at the foot of the bed.

Mabel sighed. "She's gone."

"Who's gone?"

"The ghost," Mabel said. "She was right here."

"Sure you weren't dreaming?" Dipper asked.

"Don't think so. She wore my sheet."

"Probably left from embarrassment. Sure it was a girl ghost?"

"She was sobbing. I could tell."

Dipper shrugged. "OK, OK, be right back." He left for a moment, then returned with his compact Anomaly Detector, a gift from Grunkle Ford. He switched it on.

"Anything?" Mabel asked as he scanned the room.

"Hmm. Some residual emanations. Nothing real strong."

"Guess she's gone away. Maybe it was the girl whose dress I bought."

"Could be," Dipper said. "I don't think our house has ever been haunted."

"Well—OK. Uh, want to sleep over in case she comes back?"

"We're a tad too old for that," Dipper said. "I mean, if Mom caught us—"

"Yeah." Mabel sighed. "Now I know what Wendy meant when she said she'd give anything to be twelve again that time, just before Weirdmageddon."

Dipper's heart thumped. _Because she and I would have been the same age?_ He took out the thought, looked over it, and tossed it in the trash. _Nah. Because high school was so rough for her at first._

"Leave your door open," Dipper suggested, "and I'll open mine. Call out if anything happens."

"You got it. Thanks, Brobro."

He went back to his room, and Mabel put the sheet and coverlet back on her bed. But before she turned in again, she took the dress from her closet, pulled her desk chair over close to the bed, and draped the garment over it. Then she turned off the light and felt her way back to the bed.

"Hey," she whispered as she got under the covers, "if that's you—the girl whose dress this is, I mean—here it is. Come back if you want. I'm not afraid. I'll listen to you. Maybe I can help you. OK? It's Mabel, by the way." She yawned. "I'm here if you want me."

Nothing more disturbed her.

At least—not that night.

* * *

 

**2 Out of Time**

Thursday after school, Dipper went to his usual guitar lesson. Then when he got back, Mabel spent the late afternoon working on altering his costume, much to his annoyance. "Why do I have to model it?" he asked.

"So it'll fit perfectly, duh!" Mabel shot back. "Hold still." She pinned up the trouser cuffs, stepped back, shook her head, and then knelt to re-pin them, while Dipper stood on a low step-stool. "I think one of your legs is shorter than the other one."

"It is not. I'd know," Dipper said. "I mean, I'm on the track team and all!"

"Then it's the way you're standing." Mabel stuck a bunch of pins between her lips as she undid the fold and then refolded the cuff. "Ff oo'd us an ill iss oo'd o asser."

"If you'd take those pins out of your mouth, I could understand you," Dipper returned. "Come on, you're usually faster than this!"

Mabel re-pinned the cuffs, then knee-walked backward to tilt her head and examine her handiwork. "Are you standing straight?"

Dipper adjusted his stance. "This is as straight as I can stand!"

"OK, it's the way the pants are cut. That'll do. Take 'em off and I'll hem them!"

"This is embarrassing," Dipper said, stepping down from the stool and stripping off the trousers. "Ow! One of your pins scratched me!"

"Don't blame them—they're straight pins. Jut be more careful. OK, I got 'em. Take five, Bro!"

"I'll take more than that," Dipper said, pulling on his jeans. "Seriously, why's it taking you so long?"

"I usually make our costumes from scratch!" Mabel reminded him. "With these, I have to work with what we've got. Hey, how come _your_ costume isn't haunted?"

"I don't know. Maybe because it was made for a college production of _Anything Goes_ and wasn't worn by a real person, just an actor."

"How'd you know that?" Mabel asked.

"It's on the label inside the jacket—'Manufactured by Hennessey Costumes for Brainard College production _Anything Goes_.' It's in permanent marker, faded but readable."

Mabel turned the jacket inside-out. "Huh. I didn't notice that. But actors could be ghosts. I mean, they're real people."

"But the one who used this didn't die tragically."

"You don't know that."

"I checked it with the anomaly detector. Nothing."

"Oh." When he started out of her room, Mabel asked, "Hey, in case I need to redo anything, where you gonna be?"

"On my laptop. Got some stuff to look up."

"OK, long as I can find you."

He glanced at her. "Ghost hasn't been back?"

"Not sure," she said. "Crazy dreams."

"Mindscape-type dreams?"

"Yeah, like that." Mabel took the jacket—already pinned for a tuck—and trousers to the corner where her sewing machine waited. One good thing about their impending move to the bigger house: there would be a room between her bedroom and Dipper's, and she could put her craft stuff there on one side and Dipper could put his music stuff on the other, and their bedrooms would be less crowded.

Though to tell the truth, she wasn't sure she'd want to be sewing at the same time Dipper was doggedly chasing the elusive guitar chords he still had trouble with. She suspected they'd get on each other's nerves. Dipper went out as she bent over the sewing machine and, humming to herself, finished one cuff. She started on the other—and the machine froze in mid-stitch. "Come on, come on," she grumbled under her breath. "What now?"

The needle had stopped a fraction of an inch above the fabric. Mabel leaned in close to see if it had caught on something, but it looked OK. Impatiently, she pushed back from the sewing table, and a spool of thread rolled off the edge.

And hung in the air.

"Oh, fine," she said, turning around. "Hi. Who are you?"

"My name," said the strangely-costumed woman standing behind her, "is not important."

She wore a sort of gray bodysuit, tight, with darker gray armor over her shoulders, chest, and legs. Black flexible boots, green gloves, and a helmet that came down over her eyes and included green goggles that concealed her eyes. A strip of silver duct tape above her left breast seemed to conceal a name plate, and above the right was a neon-green image of an hourglass.

"Time Paradox Avoidance and Elimination, huh?" Mabel asked. "New uniform design, though."

" _Old_ uniform design," the woman corrected. "This is the first-gen. I come from not very far in your future. They recruit us from all eons, you know."

"So—what are you doing here? I'm busy, Duct Tape."

"That's not my name."

"Yeah, but it's what you covered your name badge with," Mabel pointed out reasonably. "Come on, is there something I gotta do to wear my costume, or what?"

"You can't wear the costume," the woman said. "I was sent back to warn you about that."

"By Time Baby?"

"Um, no. Actually, T.B. will not is have been thawed out when I am have been recruited—Major Blandin is my immediate superior."

" _Major_ Blandin? Guy with brown hair and thick goggly glasses, goes 'I-I-I' a lot?"

"Well, yes, he does. I've met Time Baby, of course, because we're pretty free to zip around the time-lines as needed. But he really won't have been will be fully in charge for—wait a time-minute, this is all beside the point! You can't wear the dress, OK?"

"Because there's a ghost attached to it."

"Because—what? You know already? Shoot, did I miss my time-mark? What day is today?"

"October 30," Mabel said.

"The year's 2014, right?"

"Yep."

The woman looked around. "This is the old house. Huh. I could've sworn the family moved before—never mind. Tell me what's happened. How did you know about the ghost?"

"Sit anywhere," Mabel said. "It's kind of a long story."

The woman sat on the foot of the bed. Mabel kept thinking she was familiar—though about all of her face that she could see consisted of chin, mouth, and nose, the helmet covering the rest, as well as the hair. Mabel spun around in her desk chair—as long as she was touching things, they could move, but otherwise they were frozen in time and space—and told about the visitation.

"Covered herself with a _sheet_?" The TPAES agent said. "That's pretty old-school!"

"Classic, I'd call it," Mabel told her. "So what's the big deal with the dress? If I wear it, do I turn into a ghost or something?"

"Something," the woman said. She sighed. "I have to go back to HQ. Now that I've located the disruption in this time line, paradoxes may will have been to be piling up! Keep juiced, I'll be back."

"Keep what?"

"Juiced. Huh. Don't you say that in 2014?"

"I don't."

"Huh. I could've sworn—well, never mind. I'll make it back in a time-jiffy if I can."

"Why wouldn't you be able to?"

"Always in motion the future and past are," the woman said with a grin. "You're the one who in another time line helped Major Blandin rescue Time Baby from being wiped out during Weirdmageddon. I remember that from training. We'll owe you one and I'll do my time-best. Expect me back in a few seconds or a hundred years. That's a time-joke."

"Time ha, time ha," Mabel said. "That's a time-laugh."

"I like your sass, kid," the woman said, and she vanished.

However, time did not re-start. Mabel wandered from her room over to Dipper's, where he lay propped up in bed, his laptop in front of him. She got up the nerve to peek at the screen—sometimes Dipper's Internet searches could be sort of disturbing—and saw that he had pulled up a record of obituaries from the 1920s. "Doing it the hard way, Brobro," she murmured, but of course he did not seem to hear or react.

She caught the ghost of a flash coming from behind her, from the open door to the landing, and a couple of seconds later, the woman walked through the doorway, muttering, "Where'd you go, where'd you go—there you are! I told you to wait!"

"I just came in to see if my brother was OK," Mabel complained.

And then, as the woman approached, behind her Mabel heard Dipper come to life, muttering: "Nope, she's too old, this one's too old, too—wait, what?"

The time traveler sighed. "OK, he's in on it now, knew he would be, but it's too late to explain everything, take these and change into them, hurry!" She thrust some clothes into Mabel's arms, while Dipper said, "Mabel? What the heck?"

"You're going on a trip!" the woman snapped. "It didn't start with you, but looks like it's gonna finish with you! Quick, get into these outfits! It's bad to hold a time stasis field too long!" She tossed a pile of clothes onto the bed.

"I'll explain later," Mabel said. "Maybe after I find out what's going on. Whoa, these are kinda weird!"

"Period clothes from 1927," the woman snapped. "Including underwear! Change, change, change!"

"I can't do that with you two in here!" Dipper said.

"You get on the other side of the bed and turn your back! Mabel, you stay on this side and turn your back to him! Now change before you make me time-mad!"

"OK, OK," Mabel said, pulling off her sleep shirt. "Sheesh! Better do as she says, Dip! Wait, this thing's a _bra?_ "

"Buttons on _underwear_?" Dipper asked from behind her.

"Figure it out!" the woman snapped. Come on, come on. You do this for me and when it's all over, I'll bring you back to this exact moment in time! Hurry!"

"These pants are way short!" Dipper complained.

"They're plus-fours!" the woman snapped. "You wear them with knee socks!"

"The fly buttons!"

"Just deal with it, Dipper!" the time traveler ordered.

Meanwhile, Mabel had figured out the bra. "Is it supposed to be tight?" she asked.

"In 1927 girls didn't show much figure!"

"What, a slip, too? Where are we going, Greenland?"

"No, a place called Greentown, Illinois! Here, let me pull that straight—now the dress, slip it over your head, don't step into it—now let me pull it down—right. Get on the stockings and shoes. Quick, let me brief you!"

Dipper had put on a loose, blousy shirt and was fooling with a tie. "This is a bow tie!" he complained. "I can't tie a bow tie!"

"Oh, for—come over here! Don't worry, she's decent!"

Dipper came around the foot of the bed, and the woman quickly and deftly tied the bow tie and then glanced downward. "Don't forget your fly!"

"I won't, but I keep misbuttoning it! Where's the zipper?"

"Not common in men's trousers until the 1930's! Do you want me to—"

"No! I'll figure it out!"

"Listen: We don't have much time! Well, we do, but I'm using up my allotment fast! I'm sending you guys back to Monday, October 31, Greentown, Illinois! We've done the time-groundwork already, so you'll spend the day in school. There you'll meet a girl called Angelique Flannigan! If you can't change history, she will die in an auto-train crash! Mabel, you give her this! Oh, shoot, I forgot it. One second!"

She flashed out of existence. Dipper asked, "Is that your ghost, because she—"

The woman flashed back in and handed Mabel a cardboard box, flattish, about fifteen inches square. "Give her this. It's her party dress that she's supposed to wear for her sixteenth birthday party on November 2, if she lives that long. Tell her you're delivering it from the seamstress who did the alterations. We took care of that already. Let me look at you. Hmm. Wish we had time to do something with hairstyles. Dipper, where's your cap? Where's your jacket?"

Dipper reached across the bed and retrieved a tan flat cloth cap and a matching jacket. Mabel, now wearing a white blouse and skirt with red and blue stripes and a long red woolen jersey, plus a matching, baggy wool cap, asked, "How do we look?"

"Authentic enough to pass if nobody examines you too closely," the time traveler said. "Ready to time travel? Hold hands!"

She took out—not a time tape, as might be expected, but a gadget that looked a little like a cell phone. "Where's the tape measure?" Dipper asked.

"Don't get those until you're second class. I'm just third. This mission may get me my promotion. Let me see . . . set the coordinates . . . set the year, month, date, time . . . set the automatic return—oh, I forgot! You have only until midnight! Make sure that Angelique doesn't get in the Stutz!"

"Get in the whaaa?" Mabel asked.

But too late. The twins felt the weird tug and jerk of time-travel, and suddenly they found themselves standing in early-morning daylight outside the Greentown High School building—three-storied, brick, and old-fashioned looking. Kids were streaming in.

"I don't like what you did to us," Dipper told Mabel.

"I just bought the dress!"

"Not that!" Dipper said. "Didn't you recognize the time traveler?"

"She was a little familiar," Mabel admitted. "But I couldn't place her."

He stared at her. "Mabel—that was _you!"_

* * *

 

**3 Mission**

As Dipper and Mabel stood outside the school, unsure of what to do next, another shock approached, in the form of a woman in medium-high heels, wearing heavy glasses and carrying a black leather satchel.

She wore a long gray wool coat, touched off at the neck by a lavender scarf, a matching gray cloche hat, and gloves. Her expression was serious, verging on severe. But despite her clothing and her age—somewhere in the thirties—and despite the glasses, Dipper gasped. "P-Pacifica?"

The woman stopped, glanced nervously around at the groups of kids walking up to and into the school, and then moved them to one side, near a black wrought-iron fence guarding the school's front lawn and murmured softly, "It's good to see you again, Dipper! Hello, Mabel. But listen: I'm undercover. For the time being, I'm Mrs. Maude Staycomb—" she made her _yechh_ face—"I didn't pick the name! And I'm supposed to be working with the state Children's Bureau here in Greentown. You two are orphans and we're temporarily fostering you with Mr. and Mrs. Christopher Flannigan, supposedly just until we find a permanent foster family or next Monday, whichever comes first. You have until midnight tonight to persuade their daughter Angelique not to do what she originally did after the dance. A suitcase with spare outfits and your party clothes is already at their house. They'll take it from here. Don't let them know!"

"Know what?" Mabel asked.

"Anything!"

"That'll be easy," Dipper said. "We don't _know_ anything!"

"Like how did we become orphans?"

"Nobody knows!" Pacifica said. "Look, we deliberately didn't develop a backstory because those can be checked. If you're asked, just say—"

"It's too sad to talk about," Dipper put in.

Pacifica gave him an oddly melancholy smile and nodded. "You always were quick to pick up on things. Some things, anyway. Come with me," she said. "We have to stop at the principal's office, and then I'll see you to Angelique's classroom. Treat her as a friend—but she's rebellious, I should warn you. Be careful not to reveal anything about time traveling! And don't teach her to high-five, Mabel! Don't say anything about the future, not one word—what is it?"

Mabel said, "Just wanted to say you grew up beautiful. I knew you would."

When Pacifica smiled again, for the first time Dipper noticed the stress lines around her eyes and mouth. "It hasn't been easy for me. I—Oh, Dipper!" She hugged him impulsively and said, "You be careful! Take care of yourself and your sister!" Then she raised her eyeglasses—just plain glass lenses, Dipper could tell, not prescription ones—dabbed at her eyes with a lacy handkerchief, and picked up her satchel. Officiously and more loudly, she said, "Children, come with me!"

She led them down the walkway and then up eight concrete steps and into the school building—it smelled strange, like pine oil and a trace of alcohol—and to an office with a frosted-glass window in the doorway stenciled in gold: "Mr. A. Willowby, Principal." As she opened the door, Pacifica whispered fiercely, "Let me do all the talking. You're shy and traumatized!"

An elderly woman with a face like a prune looked up from her desk. Pacifica explained why they were there, and the woman nodded and sent them back to an office where a thick-set dark-haired man in a three-piece suit rose from behind a desk, bare except for a green blotter and an old-fashioned black candlestick telephone. "Mrs., uh, Staycomb," he said in a rumbly voice. His smile was like a bulldog's friendly welcome. "So, these are our temporary students."

"Children," Pacifica said, "This is Mr. Adrian Willowby. He's principal here at Bradbury High School. Mr. Willowby, this is Mabel and Martin Pines, from Oakland, California. I have their paperwork in order. One moment." She rummaged in the satchel and produced a manila folder, which she handed to the principal.

"Thank you," he said, opening it and glancing at what to Dipper looked like faintly typed sheets of paper. Carbon copies, he supposed, which he'd heard and read about although he'd never seen one. "Mm, yes, your father came from Waukegan, I see. Tragic story. I'm sorry about your parents, children."

"Thank you," Mabel whispered, and Pacifica nudged her sharply.

Mr. Willowby nodded and dropped the folder onto his desk. "Well, Mr. and Mrs. Flannigan are a kind couple, and their daughter is just about your age. You'll spend the day with her here at school—Angelique is her name—and maybe you can even come to the school dance tonight. If your permanent foster family is in our district, we'll be happy to welcome you as pupils."

Trying to look sorrowful but grateful, Dipper nodded.

"Sir, I should take them to class now," Pacifica said.

"Oh, certainly, certainly, Mrs. Staycomb. That will be Mrs. Forrester's room, up on the next floor, room 212. The stairs are down the hall and to the left."

Primly, Pacifica said, "Thank you, Mr. Willowby. Come, Mabel, Martin."

The hallway thronged with students, but the stairway was clear. "Huh. Nobody here," Mabel said.

"We're in a very temporary time-out," Pacifica said. "Any final questions? We have maybe a minute, no more."

Dipper immediately said, "Martin? I'd prefer Tyrone!"

"Not a good name in this time line," Pacifica said in a firm voice. "Remember, you're Martin."

"Marty," Mabel suggested.

"That will be OK," Pacifica said. "All right, quick final instructions: get to know Angelique, see if you can find out what's troubling her, and stick with her at the dance! Watch out for a boy named Butch! She must not leave with him! And remember, you can't save everyone!"

"Butch?" Dipper asked nervously. "What—"

"Time's up, let's go!" They had climbed to the second floor, and Pacifica opened the door into a hall where students stood unmoving. "Time starts again in three, two, one—"

And the buzz of talk and the shuffling began again. Dipper noticed that he didn't stand out at all—at least half the boys wore the same kind of outfit he did, baggy trousers about knee-length or a little lower, with long socks, shirt, jacket, most with bow ties, though a few daring souls had open collars.

They drew some interested glances, and one girl, dark-eyed and with bobbed black hair, tilted her head and smiled warmly at Dipper as they passed. Mabel noticed and elbowed him. "Mind on your business, Marty!"

They found Room 212 halfway down the hall, a rectangular, high-ceilinged schoolroom with tall, wide windows looking out on the front lawn and the street. An old-fashioned chalk blackboard covered the front wall, and above it portraits George Washington and Abraham Lincoln gazed out from heavy wood frames.

As they came in, Dipper noticed the electric fixtures, which strongly brought back memories of the Westminster Mystery House in San Jose: instead of switches, the wall plates had round buttons that clicked in and out to turn the lights on or off. The lights themselves shone in two rows, each with six incandescent bulbs, hanging on chains from the ceiling and concealed inside mushroom-shaped glass shades. The light from them seemed warm and yellow, but oddly dim.

A gray-haired lady stood at the chalkboard, writing "Today's Lessons" in white chalk on black slate, the chalk clacking each time it touched the board. She put the chalk down in the eraser tray, turned and smiled. She wore that odd kind of spectacles called pince-nez, without temples or earpieces, that clipped onto the bridge of her nose and were secured to her dress lapel by a thin black ribbon. "Ah, these are our new students," she said.

Pacifica introduced them and said, "Since they'll be staying temporarily with the Flannigan family, I thought you might be so kind as to introduce them to Angelique."

"Certainly," the woman said. "I'm Mrs. Abigail Forrester, children. And you are Mabel and Martin, correct?"

"Yeah—I mean, yes," Mabel said.

Dipper had taken off his cloth cap. "Yes, Ma'am," he said. _It's a good thing that the cheap-movie channel in Gravity Falls has so many 1930's films,_ he thought. He'd seen the black-and-white adventures of school-aged Mickey Rooney and Jackie Cooper and had some grasp of how to ingratiate himself with an old-timey teacher.

"Well, Angelique sits in the last desk back on the second aisle," Mrs. Forrester said, extending a long-fingered hand to indicate the spot. "Mabel, you may take the seat next to her in the first row. I'll move Bobby from that one to the other side of the room today. Martin, you may borrow the last desk from the row there next to the windows and move it—you can just squeeze it in behind Angelique's, I think. Go on and take your seats now, and as we begin our lessons, I'll lend you books."

"Thank you, Mrs. Forrester," Pacifica said. To Mabel and Dipper, she said quietly but firmly, "Remember, people are always willing to offer help. I'll check in with you tomorrow."

"Is there any way to get in touch with you if we need you?" Mabel asked.

"No, I'm sorry. You're on your own, but I believe in you."

"Thank you," Dipper said.

Mabel took her seat and he moved the borrowed desk and chair over while Pacifica had a hushed conference with the teacher. Then she left the room and Mrs. Forrester began to write instructions about a lesson in geography.

"This," Mabel whispered to him, "is scary."

"Yeah, it is," Dipper agreed.

The students began to come in one by one, each one saying, "Good morning, Mrs. Forrester." She greeted each one by name: Belinda, Kirby, Walter, Susanna, and so on. She also introduced each one to Mabel and Martin, and eventually there were little pockets of kids whispering and darting glances toward the twins.

They waited for Angelique to show up and wondered how much trouble they'd landed in.

And, really, the day had not yet even begun.

* * *

 

Pacifica held it together all the way outside and as she walked three blocks down the street, and even as she turned into the narrow alley between Kubelksy Tailoring and the Sunny Day Delicatessen. Then, away from the street and alone, she started to weep.

The owner of the Sunny Day would have been astonished to learn that his establishment had a back room. True, it was very small—just about eight feet square—and it had no visible window or door. You got into it by walking beside a brimming, smelly, rusted steel garbage can and straight through an apparently solid brick wall, an idea borrowed from a Scottish architectural firm that specialized in not-quite-real educational structures.

In the unfurnished room, which had no light fixtures at all but was illuminated none the less with the sourceless glow of a cloudy-bright day borrowed from one morning in the the month before the dinosaurs began to go extinct, Mabel waited, leaning against a wall, arms crossed, chin down. She was still dressed in her Time Anomaly Prevention and Elimination Squad uniform, but without the helmet. Also, she had peeled the duct tape from the green letters PINES. Pacifica hugged her and cried a little. "He looked so _young_ ," she wailed, stepping back and dabbing her eyes. She took off the round hat and unpinned the bun that held her hair up. It came down to her shoulders, trimmed shorter than she had worn it as a teen. "Dipper looked so—so—he—oh, Mabel!"

Mabel sniffled. "I miss him, too," she said hoarsely. "At least he lived in the other time line we borrowed this version of him from. And now there's a chance."

"Do you think we can—you know—pull it off?"

"I don't know," Mabel admitted softly. "I hope so. Him and me together—if anybody can fix it, the Mystery Twins can." She grinned in a sad way. "That's what we called ourselves. The Mystery Twins. But even if they do—"

"I know," Pacifica said. "Everything changes, and if we're caught, we're in for it. But if we can save our Dipper's life, I'll live with the consequences."

"Yeah. I'm sorry, Paz. You deserve so much better."

"It took me a long time to learn that sometimes you do things not to help yourself or make yourself feel better, but just because they're right. Well, it's all in their hands now. If Angelique doesn't die in the car crash, then in our time line Stanford Pines will eventually get the government grant that lets him—well, you know it all already."

"Yeah." Mabel sighed. "I wonder if Time Baby will evaporate us for this? He's bound to will have had find out eventually."

"It's a rogue operation," Pacifica admitted. "But maybe he won't. You've made him a little more friendly. And Blendin told me that he's tracked all the future permutations and saving Angelique won't have any paradoxical results here and will eliminate the ghost in the other time line, which does fix a few dozen developing paradoxes there. Final analysis, it just means that our Dipper will live past the age of twenty. But then he, well, you know, even if he does, there's Wendy, and . . . well. Most likely, nothing else changes for me. I mean—he and I probably won't even get together if he does live. And then I suppose you and I wouldn't join the TPAES. So—in a way—none of this happens."

"Which is kinda what we want," Mabel said softly. "But, man, I'll miss this, even if I don't will be to have remembered or even been aware of it. Ready to face the future?"

"No," Pacifica admitted. Then she took a deep breath. "But let's do it. What?"

"Nothing," Mabel said, smiling. "Except I think I've rubbed off on you over the last ten years. Paz, whatever happens, and even if it turns out we don't even remember what we're doing now—it's been an honor serving with you."

"Thanks," Pacifica said. "Same here. In whatever time line we wind up in, let's still be friends."

"I guarantee it," Mabel told her. She had taken out her illegal time-travel device and was tapping numbers into it. "Take my hand, and let's go."

They held hands. Mabel poised her thumb over the GO button. "Good luck, Brobro," she whispered.

And then she pushed the button, and the two women—and the secret TPAES room behind the deli—vanished from the present and passed into the Everywhen.

* * *

 

**4 Meeting**

The seat in front of Dipper—and next to Mabel—remained unoccupied after the warning bell sounded. And then the class bell (a real bell, or two of them, rather, atop a gray rectangular box on the hall-side wall of the room) clanged, and only when it had stopped did a curly-haired blonde girl saunter in.

Looking confused, she paused for just an instant when she spotted Dipper, but then she realized there was an extra chair and desk in that row, and she came back and took her seat just as Mrs. Forrester began to read from the roll book: "Peter. Amanda. Cynthia—" and so on.

Each student answered, "Present."

Dipper and Mabel weren't in alphabetical order, but were tacked on at the end: "Mabel Pines. Martin Pines."

Both of them answered—and Mabel even said, "Present," instead of "Yo!" or "Absent!" Dipper felt relieved. The teacher put away the roll book and said, "I do like to see perfect attendance! Class, we have visitors today. Mabel, Martin, please stand. This is Mabel Pines and Martin Pines, for those of you who didn't get introduced as you came in. Let's make them feel welcome."

Mabel had tucked the box with Angelique's dress on the shelf beneath her chair, and she started to reach for it, but Dipper caught her eye and shook his head. He mouthed the word, "Later!" and she seemed to understand. Anyway, she straightened up in her desk just as Mrs. Forrester said, "Let us stand for the pledge."

Everyone faced the flag—which hung at the corner of the blackboard, from a wooden staff held up by a wall bracket—and repeated the words, except they left out the words "under God," which had not been part of the Pledge of Allegiance until the 1950s. Then, much to Dipper's surprise, Mrs. Forrester said, "Michael will lead the class devotion today. Michael, please come forward."

A burly kid got up and took a book that Mrs. Forrester offered him. "It's the 23rd Psalm," he said in a voice that was cracking from treble to baritone. He read the words out loud, with not quite the emotion that a computer-generated voice might have put into it. Then he sat down and they started with English.

The routine—except for the pledge and the scripture reading—began to remind Dipper of elementary school. At Piedmont, he and Mabel were used to changing classes each period, going to classes taught by teachers who specialized in their subjects. Evidently here, and in 1927, Mrs. Forrester was going to cover everything.

The first period was devoted to English, and twenty minutes of it was devoted to diagramming sentences, a skill Dipper lacked. Students went one by one to the board to draw lines and connect them in various ways: _Abraham Lincoln became the sixteenth President of the United States, and the Civil War broke out afterwards_ became a stick-figure of a sentence, with Abraham Lincoln, became, and President all on a straight line, while the other phrases and clauses of the sentence dangled from it on slanting lines and platforms of their own.

To Dipper's relief, Mrs. Forrester did not call on him or Mabel. He would have been lost. At one point, Mabel passed Angelique a note, and the surprised girl read it, glanced at Mabel, and then shrugged and nodded. Mrs. Forrester said, "Let's keep our attention on the board, class!" even though she had her back to the classroom, correcting some errant lines in the latest sentence diagram.

The forenoon passed: English, mathematics, geography, and Latin (Mabel was looking terminally bored, Dipper interested but puzzled—he knew only a smattering of Latin that he had picked up himself, mainly for biology). Finally, the bell rang for lunch, and Mrs. Forrester said, "It's a nice warm day, so you may use the picnic tables. Listen for the warning bell, everyone!" She definitely gave Angelique a meaningful look.

Angelique had brought lunch in a paper bag, like every other student except for Mabel and Dipper. She got up and took it from her desk shelf and said to Mabel, "Let's eat together. Bring it."

"We don't—" Mabel began.

But Dipper cut her off: "Here's our lunches, Sis," he said. The two paper bags had sort of appeared on his desk, and he'd guessed _Time Squad_. One of them, maybe even Blendin himself, had popped into existence for a nanosecond and left the two bag lunches, he supposed. They all walked downstairs, passed through a tiny dining room and picked up little bottles—actual, half-pint, chilly glass bottles—of milk at a counter before going into a fenced-in schoolyard. Another class was just leaving six long picnic benches.

Mabel had brought the cardboard box. When they sat down, she said, "Our, um, social worker took this from a delivery boy when we first got to school, because he asked what class you were in and she told him we'd be in the same one. It's your dress. The seamstress made some alterations and sent it over."

"I was wondering when it would come," Angelique said. She opened the box and took the dress out long enough to admire it. "I'd wear this to the dance if I could get away with it. I might hide it somewhere and change into it after I get here tonight. My mother makes me wear such dreary rags!"

Dipper had opened his lunch and discovered that he had a sandwich, an apple, and a small bag of nuts. The sandwich seemed to be bologna with lettuce and tomato. He took the tomato off because he didn't like the taste of them, though that lingered on the bread and meat.

Mabel had already torn through her own sandwich, but she reached over and snagged his tomato slice. "So, have you lived here all your life?" she asked Angelique, who was eating celery sticks, carrots, and raisins.

"Yes. It's so _boring_ ," she said. She glanced around. "Want to go sneak a smoke?"

"Sneak a what in the which now?" Mabel asked.

Angelique raised her skirt. She wore stockings, but the tops were rolled down, and tucked in the fold she had a pack of Camel cigarettes. "I've got ten left," she said, dropping the skirt back down. "You and your brother can have one."

"We don't smoke," Dipper said quickly.

"I just started this week," Angelique murmured. She looked around. "Keep it quiet. The kids here would fink me out to the teacher."

"Yeah, I hate it when somebody finks out," Mabel said, her tone telling Dipper she had no idea what the words meant. "Um. Well, hi, I'm Mabel. This is my brother Dipper."

"What?" Angelique asked, looking like she was going to erupt in laughter.

"It's a nickname," Dipper said. "You can call me Marty."

"Are you really one?" Angelique asked.

"Uh—one what?"

"A dipper!" she said. "You know, a pickpocket!"

"No," Dipper said. "It's because of something else."

"You sound like a real killjoy," Angelique said in a bored tone. "So, you two are coming to the dance?"

"Boy howdy!" Mabel said. When Angelique looked at her as if she'd taken leave of her senses, Mabel said, "Uh—that's what we say out there in Oakland! Which is where we're from. In California. Uh, our parents got eaten by sharks a lot."

"What?" Angelique asked, sliding away from Mabel on the bench.

"That's, uh, not true," Dipper said. "But, you know, it was a shock and that's how my sister deals with, uh, shocks."

"Oh," Angelique crunched a celery stick. "Must be nice not having the parents around to boss you. Not that I'm not sorry. I wouldn't want my parents to _die,_ but if they wanted to go off on a long vacation and leave me on my lonesome, that would be Jake with me." She asked, "So do you dance?"

"Uh, yeah!" Mabel said. "Looking forward to it. Any hunks go stag to your dances?"

"I . . . don't know what that means!" Angelique told her.

Dipper interpreted: "Mabel wants to know if any good-looking boys turn up alone at your dances."

"Oh, sure," Angelique said. "You'll have your pick. A bunch of them are heelers, though."

"Excuse me?" Mabel asked. "Healers? You mean doctors?"

"Heelers!" Angelique insisted. "Bad dancers, you know!"

"Where we come from," Dipper said hurriedly, "a bad dancer's a doctor."

"Oakland must have funny words," Angelique decided. "Anyhow, I'm going on my own, so, yeah, you two can tag along. Only I've got a meet-up with a guy named Butch, so I'll probably ditch the dance and go off with him for a little petting party in his jalopy."

"Uh-huh," Mabel said.

"Yeah, he's got a—shoot, there goes the bell," Angelique said, and they had to file back inside the school. They didn't get another chance to speak to her until school ended that afternoon. Then Angelique said, "You two are supposed to stay in our guest rooms, so follow me." She grabbed her schoolbooks—they were cinched together with a sort of belt—and picked up her dress box.

"I'll carry your books," Dipper offered.

"Prince Charming," Angelique said, sounding bored, but she let him take them, since he had nothing else to carry.

They walked nearly half a mile to her house, a big two-story Victorian-style three-story affair with a central tower that went up another floor above the roof. They went up ten steps to the porch, Angelique opened the door, and a woman in a maid's uniform said, "You wipe your feet, now!"

With short spiteful movements, Angelique scrubbed her shoes on the doormat. Mabel and Dipper imitated her. "Are these your guests?" the maid, a thin, fussy-looking woman asked.

"No, they're Kewpie dolls," Angelique said. "I won them in a ring-toss game."

"Hi," Mabel said. "I'm Mabel, and this is my brother Marty. Thank you for inviting us into your home."

The maid rolled her eyes. "It's none of mine! I just work here. You and your brother come on, I'll show you where you'll be sleeping. A delivery man brought your suitcase this morning. Miss Angelique, you change out of your good school clothes!"

"All right, Bertie!"

She went with them as far as the second floor, but the maid, Bertie, led Dipper and Mabel up another flight of steps. "This used to be the servants' quarters when the family had a butler, a live-in cook, and three maids in all," she told them. She pushed open a door. "One of you in here and one across the hall. Suitcase is here, so divide up your clothes. Bathroom's down at the end of the hall. If you come downstairs, you can go out in the back yard. Mr. and Mrs. Flannigan don't like Angelique's guests hanging around in the parlors."

She sort of stood guard while Dipper opened the suitcase on the bed. He seemed to have two more shirts and two more pairs of pants, one long, the other plus-fours like the ones he was wearing. He found underwear, too, and socks. "Guess this is it," he said. "So, across the hall?"

The maid gave him her first, motherly smile. "Is that all the clothes you have?"

"Yes Ma'am," Dipper said.

"Don't Ma'am me. Call me Bertie. You poor things. What happened to your folks? House fire?"

"Shar—" Mabel began.

But Dipper cut her off before the sharks struck again: "Sort of. You know, California. Earthquakes and fires and all We didn't come out of it with much. We, uh, the state, I mean, sent us here because we, our grandparents used to live here, but we found out they're dead, too, so—I guess we're on our own."

"Wards of the state," Bertie said. "Poor little lambs."

"Ooh!" Mabel said. "Marty knows a dance—"

"She means I'm not a good dancer," Dipper said. "You know, just a, uh, a heeler. But we'll try to have fun with Angelique tonight."

Bertie sniffed. "You ask me, Angelique tries to have too much fun. Well, come on and I'll put you in your room. Then you can go downstairs. Miss Angelique's probably changed by now. I guess you and your sister will have to make do with your school clothes."

She led Dipper a few steps across the hall and unlocked the door of a bedroom about a third the size of his back in Piedmont: room for a single narrow bed, a narrow table, and one straight chair. In lieu of a closet, it had a small niche with a shelf and a clothes rod. The small window looked out into a fenced back yard. "This is nice," he told Bertie.

"Nice to have a young person appreciate something. For a change," Bertie said. "I've got to go. Remember, if you come downstairs, go out in the back yard. Mrs. Flannigan is resting, and her husband won't be home from the bank for another hour."

When she had shut the door, Dipper hung up his clothes as best he could and then sat on the foot of the bed, looking out the window. From that position, all he could see was the tops of some trees. "Pacifica?" he asked out loud. "Grown-up Mabel? Are you monitoring us?"

No response.

He sighed, and even though they couldn't possibly hear him, he asked them anyway: "What the heck have you got us into?"

* * *

 

**5 Trouble**

Angelique's mother, Mrs. Flannigan, was a vague, thin, nervous-looking woman whose tightly-curled hair was a lighter blonde than her daughter's. "Take our guests outside, dear," she said to Angelique. "Show them around."

"Mother probably has one of her _headaches_ ," Angelique said sourly, and Dipper thought that if they'd been invented in her era, she would have put air quotes around the word "headaches." She led them through the house, past the dining room and kitchen, and out a back door. "Come on and I'll show you the sights," she said sarcastically.

And so, they walked out into the back yard. It was a spacious back yard, true—a level lawn, still showing green even though the trees were mostly brown or giving up the last tinges of their fall colors. Toward the back, they slushed through a heavy piling of dry leaves, because in the last third of the yard—it had to be two acres, Dipper thought—trees grew close together, almost a copse of them—majestic trees, which Dipper could not first identify. That was odd because, thanks to Wendy's expertise, he had learned to spot almost every imaginable species of tree.

And then he remembered a species that had all but gone extinct, and the picture of one swam into his mind's eye and matched what he was seeing. "Elms," he said.

"Yeah," Angelique said carelessly. "It's shady and cool back here in the summer. Good place to hide out from my parents. Used to, when I liked to read, I'd go hide myself under the trees for hours. I liked it in the fall, too, this time of year. When I was a kid, I used to love to dive in a big pile of these leaves." She kicked at them now.

They reached the back fence, black, eight feet tall, wrought-iron. Beyond it a steep descent led down to what Dipper suspected was a creek, though he couldn't see it through the undergrowth.

"You've got a really nice yard," Mabel told her.

"Yeah, so what?" Angelique said flatly. Thanks to the trees, they were out of sight of the house, and she hiked up her skirt and pulled out a cigarette from the pack tucked into her stocking. "Want one?"

"We don't smoke," Dipper said quickly.

"It's bad for you," Mabel warned. "Those things'll kill you."

Angelique shrugged moodily, took a match from her pocket, and struck it on the fence. She puffed on the cigarette and coughed. "All the kids I hang around with smoke 'em," she said. She coughed some more, and her eyes were watering.

"You just started, didn't you?" Dipper asked.

"What if I did? What's it to you?"

Dipper shrugged. "Nothing. I just thought you weren't used to it."

"Angelique," Mabel said, "you don't have to show off for us. We like you without the cigarettes and all, you know."

She flashed Mabel a short, hot glare, and then with defiance took two more quick puffs before she dropped the cigarette and stamped on it, grinding it into the leaves.

"Better be sure it's out," Mabel said. "It could start a fire."

"I wish," Angelique said moodily, "I could burn down the whole damn town!"

Mabel shot Dipper an alarmed glance. "It seems like a pretty nice place to us," he said mildly. "It's lots homier than our old neighborhood near Oakland. What do you have against it?"

"Bunch of busybodies live here," she said, leaning against an elm trunk. "You can't do this, you can't do that, nice girls wouldn't, blah, blah, blah! I'm going to be sixteen in two more days! My folks treat me like I was six!"

"At least," Mabel said softly, "You have folks."

"That's no big deal. They don't even like me."

Dipper bit back what he'd started to say—that she had to be mistaken—and instead settled for "That must be rough."

" _Used_ to bother me," Angelique said gruffly. Then she forced a smile. "Ever kissed a girl, Dipper?"

"Uh, yeah, I have," he said.

"Want to kiss me?"

"You're pretty, but—you know—I got someone back home," he told her. "We've made a promise to each other."

"Come here. California's a long way off. And I'm right in front of you."

Mabel urged him with an elbow. Unwillingly, Dipper came up to her and leaned over to kiss her. She wasn't any good at it. She pressed her lips so tightly together that it was as if she were trying to imitate a duck's beak. Then she smacked her lips as they broke apart. She also tasted of bitter tobacco smoke. "What did you think of that?" she asked triumphantly.

 _Not much!_ "It was good," he lied. "It was OK."

"Angelique," Mabel asked, "what did your mom and dad do to make you so angry at them?"

"Oh, I don't know," she said, sounding both sad and irritable. "Just—I can't talk to them! About anything! If I try with Mom, she just says, 'It will all work out when you're older.' And with Dad, it's 'Go ask your mom.' If Marcie hadn't left home—"

"Who's that?" Mabel asked.

"Marceline. My big sister. She's off at college in Poughkeepsie, New York. About as far from this dump as she could get!" Her face crumpled, and a couple of tears ran down her cheeks. "Damn it. Look what you made me do. I—Marceline was the one I always could—could t-talk to, and sh-she's gone."

Mabel hugged her, and to Dipper's surprise, Angelique, the tough girl, clung to her and sobbed. "The k-kids at s-school are saps. They d-don't like me. At least Butch and his pals don't t-treat me like poison!"

"Dipper," Mabel said gently, "go away. We want to have a girl talk."

"OK," Dipper said. He went back past the house, through the front gate, and since no one seemed to be around, he continued for a long walk, down Parkside Street, past houses that became gradually less grand, lots that became gradually smaller. He passed the graceful old Carnegie Library and noticed a sort of trail leading through an overgrown empty lot beside it, snaking down an incline—the same one, he supposed, that passed behind the Flannigan house.

On impulse, he turned left and walked along the path through scattered trees, down a hillside. Sure enough, he saw water ahead—not just a creek, as he'd thought, but a slow river. A fallen tree lay across it. Dipper started down toward the watercourse, but somehow the shadows grew too dim, too deep, too quickly.

His skin tingled, his blood pounded. He realized he had not just gone down a slope, but into a ravine overhung with despondent-looking trees, gloomy and dark in a way that he didn't like. He felt something in the air, something that did not like him, or any living person. At the farthest edge of hearing came sounds sinister soft: whispers, surly resentful sounds, threats, words that failed to shape themselves in his ears, the suggestions of quick stealthy footsteps just behind him.

_If I only had my anomaly detector!_

What had Falstaff said in the Shakespeare play after escaping certain death by playing dead? "The better part of valor is discretion." Sometimes true courage consisted of simply knowing when to get the heck out of Dodge.

This was the time.

He reversed course and discovered he'd somehow wandered off the pathway. No matter. He'd navigated his way through trackless forest in Gravity Falls, and he could do the same thing in Greentown, Illinois! Dipper climbed up the steep bank, grabbing for handholds—saplings, roots half eroded from the earth, even briars with wicked sharp thorns that bit blood from his palms. He sensed seething insensate rage all around him, a disappointment that he had not ventured just one step more into the ravine, a vengeful hatred of his intrusion into dreaming malignant evil that waited like the open petals of a Venus' flytrap to snap shut on . . . meat.

Up the slope the trees thinned at last, and he glimpsed the tan sandstone of the library building far above him—the building stood, he now realized, on the edge of a bluff. But, keeping it in view, he crabbed sideways, tripping and slipping until he struck the path again, then half-ran, half-stumbled back to the street. He wiped his bloody palms on his handkerchief, the wounds smarting.

And then—someone stood looking at him just as he lurched into the abandoned overgrown lot beside the library, and Dipper stopped, staring.

An old man, wearing a black suit that in its creases looked almost green with age, stood on the sidewalk, leaning on a cane. Long, straggling gray hair hung lank from the sides of his head, the summit of it bald as the crest of an eroded old mountain. His face was like a relief map of time, wrinkles and folds, ridges and valleys, the skin yellowish, the eyes gazing out of dark deep-set caves, the irises black and sharp and glittering. The ancient suit hung loosely on him, his scrawny neck projecting from the collar of his shirt—white silk, but yellow with age—and the black string tie hung limp at his sagging throat. He was smiling, with snaggly, wide-spaced teeth the color of pawns in an antique ivory chess set.

Dipper paused, frozen in shock, and in a whispery papery voice, the old fellow said, "The ravine's no place to wander, son! No place for a youngster to roam and ramble. It's a hungry spot, one of the mouths of Earth wanting to champ and chew on flesh and sinew, to drink blood and crunch bone! Only the lonely ones stray there and stay there. You're too young to join their ranks! Be warned. Stay well out of it."

"Y-yes, sir," Dipper stammered. The old man looked and sounded evil, but—his words rang almost in a friendly way.

"I won't bite," the old man said, grinning. "I can't bite! Can't afford to lose even one more chopper! You recognize me, boy?"

"N-no, sir," Dipper said, approaching, but very slowly.

The spindly form straightened, the left hand raised and pointed the cane—it reminded Dipper of Bill Cipher's antics, especially when the old guy hung the cane on thin air and it stayed dangling there. "Why, I'm famous!" he cackled, taking an elaborate bow, his lefpplrm folded over his stomach, his right extended to the side. He straightened again. "Toured the world, I did, with the Darkness and Gloom Consolidated Shadow Show and Mystic Circus! I'm Mr. Electrician, I am, born and bred in Greentown and mean to die there one day! Watch me!"

He stretched his bony arms out to either side, spread his fingers—and from each one and from his two thumbs, cobwebby blue lightning forked and crooked, sizzling, bolts three inches long, creeping and writhing, bending double like an inchworm measuring you for your coffin, creeping across his palms and the backs of his hands on spidery electric legs.

"Yes, sir!" he said in a chant, holding his palms a foot apart so the crooked lightning snapped across the gap like it did in the machinery of an old Frankenstein film, "Struck by lightning at the age of three, I was! Given up for dead by the doctors! Gave my mother quite a shock! Then I opened my eyes and zizzed with electricity and woke to my destiny! Mr. Electrician! I can take any jolt of juice, any voltage and amperage, and laugh it off! In a thunderstorm, I go stand on the tip top tower of a tall building holding a steel rod straight up and I laugh at the lightning strikes! The more I absorb, the more life I have! Why, when I retired with the rheumatiz, I got so creaky and cranky and crabbed that I had my daughter, the Woman Made of Rubber, drive me to the State Penitentiary and persuaded the warden to strap me into the electric chair! Didn't want a reprieve, no sir, ha-ha! The guard threw that big old copper switch one, two, three times, and each time the contacts clicked and buzzed like ten million angry hornets, and twenty amps at twenty thousand, count 'em, twen-ty thou-sand volts surged through my body! Any ordinary man would have been cooked, fried, killed stone hot dead, steam coming out of every pore, blood boiled to red-jelly pudding! Me, when they unstrapped me, sonny boy, I jumped up from that chair and danced the Turkey Trot to a ragtime tune tinkled out by Warden Williams on the honkey-tonkey ivories of an upright grand normally used to play funeral tunes as a good-riddance for the undearly departed! Killed the rheumatics stone dead, it did, and left me in fine fettle! Ain't hobbled a step since, and that's been ten years ago!" He grabbed the cane from the air with his left hand, twirled in place and did a shuffling soft-shoe, then grinned, electricity sparking from his teeth, leaned way forward, holding his cane behind him and high, and extended a bony right hand. "Shake it for luck!" he said.

"Bill?" Dipper asked in an unsteady voice. "Is that you?"

Mr. Electrician roared with thundery laughter. "No, sir, I am the one, the only, the original, the unparalleled Mr. Electrician of Greentown! Born Harry Ray, new-christened by the bolt from the blue on my third birthday, and Mr. Electrician from then until forever! Shake my hand and get a charge of good luck! I see mistrust in your eyes and fear in your bearing! Shake my hand and shake 'em off! Lack of trust can rust you, boy! This is your one and maybe your only chance to do what you must do and still get to sleep in your own bed and not in your grave tonight! It's meant kindly, so kindly take it. Going once! Going twice! Going thr—"

Impulsively, Dipper reached out and shook the nearly skeletal hand. It was like grasping a leather bag filled with loose sticks. But the fingers closed on his, and he felt a rush of power, grabbing him, flowing up his arm and down his legs, grounding him, shocking him, shaking him and then leaving him standing and feeling that after a long time locked in an airless closet he was gulping down sweet fresh air. Life flowed into him, and he said, "Wow!" as the old man let go. He felt wonderful. He gave Mr. Electrician a grin.

"Just donated you a little, sonny boy," the old man said. "You'll need it. Didn't change anything, just sent you a little extra lease on life on a day when I sense you'll need it." He winked. "Ain't no proper angel, but I got a feeling when the good Lord reached down His finger of lighting and touched a little baby, He gave the boy a greater purpose. Six times now I've used it and not had to regret it once. When I do it a seventh time, I figure I'll lay down my bones and go to meet my Maker and shake Him by the hand. Suppose it'll be much of a shock?" He cackled with laughter again. "Best be on your way now, son. Stick to the sunny side of the street as you go, and don't you look back, and don't ever ramble into the ravine again, not here. There's things hiding in that hollow that harrow me, and I'm no chicken, spring or winter! No, don't say a word, boy, no thanks, no farewells. Just go and remember Mr. Electrician!" He pointed his cane toward the clear sky—and a bolt of lightning leapt from it.

In the jumble of the rumbling thunder and the cascade of the old man's crackling laughter, Dipper ran fNull-tilt back up Parkside Street, the wind in his ears, heading for Mabel and for whatever it was that lay ahead.

* * *

 

**6 Intersections**

So much hinged on such little things, the minor habits of the people, the rules and assumptions of the times, the customs, aspirations, fears, all the small unnoticed things that made up the mosaic of everyday life. An agent for TPAES had to remember these and immerse himself or herself in them, like a person plunging into a raging, storm-torn sea.

Agents Pines and Northwest had spent virtual months (virtual in the sense they had been passed in a time bubble that held them in place during the flow of time elsewhere) learning about all sorts of trivia. For example, a fact crucial to their plans was that Illinois did not require a drivers' license until the 1930s. Until then, anyone who could drive, well, could legally drive. And that included sixteen-year-olds like Charles Reichart, a classmate of Angelique's who had been driving—out of family necessity—for nearly a year now.

Everyone called him "Chazz." A boy a little taller than average, shy, but both smart and strong, Chazz was just the type of high-school student whom everyone, including teachers, overlooked. He needed glasses but didn't wear them often—spectacles were expensive to replace, so unless he was seated and reading or writing, they stayed in the case.

He played a so-so game of football. Chazz was farsighted and sometimes had trouble if the ball came his way, but he did not often handle the ball, and was just good enough to be on the Bradbury Bandits team as a second-string lineman. He never joined in the locker-room banter, never boasted about girls he had kissed, and kept quiet when the other team members grew raucous. He had a fondness for crossword puzzles. He was the editor of the high school newspaper, the _Blazon,_ and though he wrote well, for the most part he simply edited and corrected stories that the reporters turned in. He was in the tenth grade, and a gifted English student, so he had no problem correcting the grammar of seniors.

He and Angelique had been in the same classrooms since first grade. And, as Mabel had discovered, Chazz had long had a crush on Angelique but—

She didn't know it. And unless events changed in this time line, she would die before learning about it.

You see, his family lived on Lake Street, in a rental house. His dad worked for the White Blossom Flour Company as a floor foreman. Chazz had two younger brothers. All three boys slept in the same room, because it was a small house and there were no other rooms. His family owned an automobile, a 1914 Willys-Knight that sometimes ran and sometimes didn't. His father had bought it third-hand. Chazz had learned to drive it and used it when a necessity arose—taking Mom to the doctor, driving her to the grocery store, and things like that.

In short, the Reicharts were poor. Not hardscrabble, dirt-poor, but bottom-rung-of-the-middle-class poor. The Flannigans were Greentown aristocracy—they owned a big house and rental properties and a half interest in the Luminary Theater, where for a dime kids could see Tom Mix as a cowpoke and James Pierce as Tarzan of the Apes and Laurel and Hardy as two inept but well-meaning loafers, and Charley Chaplin as an acrobatic tramp and Louise Brooks, with her smoldering eyes, and a thousand other shadows on the screen. Mr. Walter Flannigan was the chairman of the Greentown Savings and Loan Bank. He was a somebody.

Chazz Reichart felt as if he were nobody. He would have loved to walk Angelique home after school (though he would have to walk a mile in the wrong direction and then re-walk it to get home again, he would have done it every day). He would have loved to share a soda with her at the counter in Holtzclaw's Drug Store (except the Reichart boys rarely had nickels to squander on sodas). He would have loved to dance with her—if only just once (but he was from the far side of the Illinois Central tracks). So, even though they were in the same classroom, he almost never even spoke to her.

Nobody knew about this except him—no one in 1927, that is.

But years later, when he became a newspaper columnist, he had once written a melancholy, sweetly sad "From the Lookout Post" Sunday column—it had appeared in more than a hundred U.S. newspapers on the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941—in which he reminisced about his long-lost love, Angie (as the column called her).

The column became popular and was reprinted in many other newspapers and in books. E.B. White referred to it in a story in _The New Yorker._ Five years later, in 1946, Frank Capra turned the story into a film, _Angie_ , that became a holiday staple even later, when TV came along. The column even won Chazz a major award, but since other things happened on that column-publication day away off in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, other news soon overwhelmed his success. However, his reputation as a newspaperman did get Chazz, who was forty that year and too old to be drafted, an appointment as a front-line war correspondent, beginning in 1942.

Chazz covered the fighting in North Africa and in Italy. He was in the second wave landing at Omaha Beach on D-Day in June 1944. Not long after that, still unmarried, he died in a farmer's field in France. He is buried in the Normandy American Cemetery, his marker one of 9,387, and indistinguishable from the other crosses over the graves of those who followed his faith. No one has ever once visited that grave. After his death, the newspaper syndicate he worked for collected his stories in a book, _Under Fire: Stories of Men at War_. It hit the best-seller list briefly. And then people forgot.

However, the book and all the rest of his columns, peacetime and wartime, in the yellowing pages of old newspapers, remained as a sort of memorial. Long after his time, librarians microphotographed them and recorded them on film and microfiche and then still later other technicians digitized them, and that is how the TPAES happened on the one for December 7, 1941. Mabel realized that Chazz had never married, and she found two dozen later articles by him that briefly referenced his angel or his Angie.

And that fact was the reason why a brunette woman with big round spectacles and wearing a severe gray dress with a matching hat knocked on the Reichart door on the afternoon of October 31, 1927.

Oddly, at the moment she was doing this, across town the same woman, or rather a different and younger version of her, was also encouraging Angelique Flannigan to unburden herself of her fears and worries and doubts. That is possible when one is a time traveler.

Mrs. Reichart, who had been preparing a chicken for roasting, came to the door wearing an apron. "I'm sorry," she said. "We don't need to buy anything—"

"Is this where Charles Reichart lives?" Mabel II asked her.

"He's—my son. What's wrong?" the woman asked with the quick fear of a woman used to troubles.

"Nothing," the stranger said with a reassuring smile. "I'm Molly Brown, and I work for the _Farmers' Guardian_." That was a state-wide newspaper, printed three times a week, and sold mostly by mail subscription to people too poor to pay for a big daily paper to be tossed on their doorstep. "I may have a writing job for Charles, if he's interested."

"Oh, I—well. Come in, please. The place is a mess."

It wasn't a mess. It was simply poor, with a sofa that looked a little saggy and a little threadbare, a battered wood-cased radio on a bookcase, some cheap, unframed reproductions of art on the walls. Mrs. Reichart called her son, and Chazz came in, looking worried, peering through spectacles at the visitor. His face was pimply—not badly so, though—with brown hair parted dead center and slicked down. He was not handsome, but not ugly, either. And not exactly average. His face had character, and a girl could get interested in it.

Mabel II introduced herself as Molly. "The _Guardian_ ," she said, "wants to introduce a page of high-school news. We'll have young writers composing columns for us in which they talk about what it's like to be a high-school student in today's world. Just the little everyday things, you know. Football games and pep rallies, cramming for exams, hanging out at the soda parlor, dances, troubles and triumphs. We'd like you to write one of the first columns. If it goes over, we might hire you to do one a week."

"I—I'm not much of a writer," Chazz said.

"Yes, he is," his mother told Mabel, putting a hand on her boy's shoulder.

"I know he is," Mabel replied with a smile. "I've read some of his pieces in his school newspaper. Charles, you have a way with words. Now, I understand your school is having a fall dance tonight."

He took a deep breath and adjusted his glasses. "Uh—yes."

"So, I'm asking you to attend the dance, dance at least once with a girl, and then by next week write a column about school dances and how students feel about them. We'll need no less than two and a half typed pages, double-spaced, and no more than three. You'll need to drop it in the mail—I'll give you an envelope for that—by Wednesday of next week. Will you do that for us?"

"Sure, he will," Mrs. Reichart said.

"I—I wasn't planning to go—I don't have a date."

Mabel laughed. "As I remember high school, that isn't a problem. About half the boys and girls came without a date. _Can_ you go?"

"Uh, well—sure, I could. I guess."

Mabel reached into her purse. "Here is five dollars," she said. "If the _Guardian_ goes for your stuff, you'll get five dollars for each column they run. If they don't like it, you get to keep this first payment anyway. Is that fair?"

"M-more than fair," Chazz said. He accepted the five-dollar bill and stared at its portrait of Benjamin Harrison. "Thank you."

"Here is the envelope. It's already stamped. Just put your column in it and drop it in the mail so it will go out on Wednesday. Thank you, and good luck!"

Mabel II said her goodbyes and walked out of the house. A few blocks away, Pacifica, also in period disguise, leaned over to open the passenger door of a 1925 Model T Ford. "How'd it go?"

"He's hooked," Mabel said. "You sure you can drive this thing?"

"Oh, sure."

"Can he, if we need him to?"

Pacifica chuckled. "It's easier than a golf cart. Except for starting it when the engine's cold. Then you have to get out and wind it up with a crank!"

"But can Chazz drive it?"

"Sure, he can!" Pacifica said. "That's why Major B. picked this one. You have the letters for the Reicharts and the Flannigans?"

"Yep. It's gonna seem strange to them when they're delivered in two years."

Pacifica said, "This is the biggest risk we're taking. This could really alter the time line."

Mabel replied, "We have to do it, though. Otherwise, they wouldn't know to liquidate some of their holdings—Mr. Reichart has about a thousand dollars in stock that comes as a Christmas bonus from his company every year—and invest in General Dynamics Electric Boat and the Container Corporation before the markets crash in October of '29. You saw the simulations. They'll both get through the crash fine, and the Reicharts will wind up comfortably well off, if they follow the suggestions—and they probably will, because they'll both think the advice came from a savvy old Army buddy from World War I. The Flannigans won't lose their silk shirts. Oh, they'll be less rich than they are now, but they'll cushion the blow with the investments."

Pacifica fiddled with levers, turned the key, and stepped on a silvery button on the floor of the car, and the engine chugged to life. "Now we have to make sure Chazz gets the key to this thing."

"I'll have Dipper hold it for him."

"Here's hoping we pull this off," Pacifica said.

"Yeah." Mabel II reached for a seat belt that wasn't there and then settled back and sighed.

"What's wrong?"

Mabel shrugged. "Just—if everything goes perfectly, if it clicks, then you and I get a re-set. You won't be in the TPAES. We won't have worked together for ten years. I mean, I think I might still become an agent—but I'll miss our ten years."

"Me, too. But you know, at least Major B promised we'd both remember everything. Even if we re-set to being nineteen years old, we'll have all this. Uh—do you really think you'll join the TPAES when you're twenty again? I mean, my only reason for joining was that Dipper—our Dipper, I mean—well, because he didn't make it."

"I'm thinking about it," Mabel II said. "Right now, I'm dating a cutie from 5,412. And maybe I'm supposed to do that. I don't know. Somehow I think I've got a great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson who might be kinda dependent on that relationship working out."

"Ew, I don't like guys who are that much older," Pacifica said.

"Younger," Mabel corrected.

"Whatever." Pacifica turned onto Parkside Street. "Funny how in the alternate time line you and Dipper came back to Gravity Falls that next summer, but in ours you didn't get back until you were both fifteen and Wendy had had that big fight with her dad and she moved away to Portland and dropped completely out of sight."

"I know," Mabel said. "Dipper finally got over her, though they were still texting each other when, you know, it happened."

Pacifica hesitated and then asked, "Do you think—oh, forget it."

"Do I think that if our Dipper survives, you and he might have a chance?"

In a small voice, Pacifica said, "Yeah."

"If you don't," Mabel said with assurance, "my brother is a dumb-dumb. And he's never been that in any time line yet." She sniffled. "I used to call him Brobro," she whispered.

"You will again," Pacifica said.

They chugged down the street toward the high school at the sedate speed of twenty-five miles per hour. Maybe the car wouldn't be used at all, maybe it would. One thing Blendin Blandin had learned in this time line, when he struggled to reconstitute a broken TPAES after Weirdmageddon, was that all time everywhere was in constant flux. When it wasn't working right, when it had to be repaired, plans to fix it had to be flexible, too.

If only they could foresee every potential problem, that is.

And of course, no one, not even Time Baby, could possibly do that.

* * *

 

**7 Convergence**

Dipper stopped to watch the trolleys on the next block. He'd never seen any in practical use—just the San Francisco cable cars that were towed along by steel cables running in grooves beneath the pavement. The Greentown trolleys were the real deal, operating from overhead power lines like huge electric trains, the contacts buzzing and snapping, bright yellow-orange sparks sizzling and drifting down from the trolley-wheel on the end of its pole.

Two of the trolleys passed each other over on the next street, one stopping at the corner to let three or four riders off. Then the vehicle rumbled away again, the electrical flashes bright even in the afternoon sunlight. Dipper turned to head back to the Flannigan house and nearly ran into the grown-up Mabel, who stood with her hands on her hips, looking irritable. "There you are! Where did you go, Dipper?"

"Um—" it was so weird seeing her as she would look at thirty! "I, uh, you—my sister—my Mabel, I mean, told me to go away for a while. I just walked down to the library—"

Mabel II didn't seem to be paying attention, but was glancing around. She led him to an empty house with a FOR SALE sign staked in the yard and then around behind the house, its weedy back yard screened by a line of tall redcedar trees, trimmed to teardrop shapes. Mabel II stopped there and said, "Well, you're throwing us off schedule. Here, take this."

Dipper couldn't help laughing.

"What?" she asked, still holding out a key with a round red-brown pressboard fob attached.

"Nothing," he said, "except the idea of _you_ having a schedule in the first place! I'm the one who plans everything to the min—umph!"

His grown-up sister had grabbed him and held him tight in a hug. She had more than a millimeter on him now—she was three or four inches taller, and surprisingly strong. Her voice cracking, she said, "Oh, Dipper! I've missed you so much!"

He awkwardly hugged her, right there in the back yard of a suburban house. Nervously, he asked, "Uh—why? Do I turn out to be a jerk or something?"

She let go of him. "No, nothing like that. Here. Hold onto this key. At the dance tonight, look around for a squinting boy. He won't be well-dressed. His hair's parted right in the middle, it's about our shade of brown, and he's taller than you are. His name is Chazz."

"Uh, Chazz, yeah, I noticed him in class today," Dipper said. "Quiet guy."

"You've got two jobs. One is to watch Angelique. If she tries to slip out of the gym, you go after her and stop her. Your other job is to get her and Chazz together. Try to persuade him to ask Angelique to dance. He may or may not go for it—he's shy around her. If the worst happens, drag him with you out to the parking lot."

"The, uh—the _worst_? What's that?" Dipper asked, liking this less and less.

"You'll know it if it happens. Watch out for an older guy, though, seventeen, not too bright. Reddish hair, tall, sneers a lot. He'll probably be wearing baggy pants held up by suspenders and a shirt without a collar. Maybe a leather jacket over that. His name's Oswald, but everybody calls him Butch. He'll probably have two guys as wingmen. Keep Angelique away from him!"

"What, uh, what happens if—if I can't?"

"You _have_ to. Look, I can't explain, Dipper, but believe me on this. Things are coming together fast. Major Blandin and Pacifica and I know we're going to have just one chance to fix things in this time line. It will also fix things in yours—I mean, because of a million variables, Angelique's trouble didn't impact _you_ in your time line, but if we repair this one, the reverberations will—it's too complicated! We have one shot and it _has_ to work, OK?"

"Mabel, I—I'm not sure I can pull this off. I mean, look, why didn't you bring your Dipper? Because he'd be old enough to—"

Mabel swallowed hard. "Never mind! Now, the key. Take it! The car this starts is a Ford T-Model. Chazz will know what that is, even if you don't. It's already parked in the last slot toward the street on the right of the exit, backed into the slot, ready to peel out and turn onto the street. Chazz can drive it. I hope you won't have to use it—it's not even Plan B, more like Plan D—but just in case, keep the key with you. You'll know if you have to use the car. Wish us luck."

"Ah, y-yeah, sure. And when this is over, Mabel and me—I mean my Mabel—she and I can go, uh, home, I guess? Back to our own time line?"

"The very second after you left. Unless things really go off the track. But get Chazz to ask Angelique to dance! That's very important! And remember—watch out for a big guy, two years older than you, named Butch Elgrin."

"Mabel, you sure grow up to be scary!"

"I don't mean to be. It's just we've worked on this so long, and it's so important."

"So—how do I grow up?" Dipper asked.

After a moment of silence, Mabel II responded quietly: "That remains to be seen."

The Flannigans' cook prepared a nice dinner, which they ate a little early. Then Mrs. Flannigan said, "Well, if the young people are going to the dance, they'd better get dressed."

Mabel's dress was silvery-gray, with rows of glittery silver tassels, a silver headband with a poofy little burst of white feathers, and long white beads. Her shoes were black, with just a suggestion of heels—she rarely wore heels, never high ones, and the thoughtfulness of the costumers impressed her.

She met Angelique, who was in a white beaded satin dress with a scoop neck and scalloped hemline. She wasn't wearing a headband, but did have a white feather boa draped around her neck and shoulders.

"You look nice!" Mabel told her when they met in the hallway.

"Here," Angelique said, handing her an oversized handbag. "I'm borrowing this from my mother. You carry it so she won't insist on looking through it!"

"What's . . . in there?" Mabel asked.

"You know."

Oh, of course. The red dress.

Mabel took the handbag. Angelique knocked on Dipper's door, and he opened it. "I'm not so sure about this," he said.

He was wearing gray cuffed trousers, a white shirt—he had finally figured out how to attach the celluloid collar to a button at the back of his neck—and an awning-striped sports jacket in maroon, teal, and pale gold. He held a tie in his hand.

"You look fine," Angelique said. "Put on your tie and let's go."

"I can't tie a bow tie!" Dipper said.

"Let me." Mabel stepped up, looped the tie beneath the celluloid collar—"This collar deal is a kind of good idea," she murmured—and in five seconds had made a perfect butterfly bow beneath his chin. "There! Doesn't my brother look good, Angelique?"

"He's the berries!" Angelique said, and since she winked suggestively, Dipper supposed that meant something good. Then she added, "Come on, we're going to ask Davies to drive us—I don't want my dad taking us!"

They went down the back stairs. Dipper wondered what Angelique had against her father, who seemed a perfectly nice, stodgy, kindly man. They found Davies, who turned out to be a chauffeur/yard man/butler sort of fellow, and he agreed to drive them. "I'll pull the Doozy around," he said, shrugging into a blue coat.

Angelique went to say goodbye to her mother, and the moment they were alone, Dipper asked, "What did you find out?"

"Not a lot," Mabel admitted. "Angelique's always felt sort of second-place to her older sister. I think Angelique wasn't p-l-a-n-n-e-d—"

"You don't have to spell it out!" Dipper complained.

"Well, she spelled it out to me. Anyway, as long as Marci was here—Marceline, that's her name—things were sort of OK. But Marci looked out for Angie, you know, the way I do for you. Why did you snort? Never mind. Anyway, Marci went off to Vassar—I think that was the school—and Angie thinks it's like she's dead to her folks now. They don't, I don't know, engage her? Aren't interested in her thoughts and feelings? Just want her to toe the line and not cause any trouble. She's lonely, Dipper. She's awfully lonely, and the other kids at her school are sort of leery of her because she's richer than anybody else there. That's why she started hanging around with Butch Elgrin."

"That's the guy we've got to keep her away from—" Dipper started, but then Angelique came hurrying in again and opened the back door.

"Come on, let's go before Dad gets curious," she said. "Mabel, have you got the handbag?"

"Right here," Mabel said.

They went outside. The garage was slightly behind and to the left of the house, and Mr. Davies had pulled out a long, boxy cream-white touring car. Davies opened the passenger door. "Young ladies."

"Uh—could I ride in front?" Dipper asked.

"Well—I don't mind, young gentleman," Davies told him.

Dipper got in, reached for the seat belts, remembered there were no seat belts, and pretended to be adjusting his collar and jacket instead. As Davies slipped behind the wheel, Dipper asked, "What, uh, what kind of car is this?"

Davies glanced at him in surprise. "It's a 1926 Duesenberg sedan, sir," he said.

"I've, uh, never seen one," Dipper told him. "It's nice."

"We don't have them in California," Mabel added helpfully from the back seat.

"Indeed? Very surprising," Davies said as he put key in the ignition, turned it, and stepped on something on the floorboard that evidently started the car.

Dipper slipped his hand in his right jacket pocket to make sure he hadn't forgotten. No, here was the car key that the older version of Mabel had given him, right where he'd tucked it.

OK, he probably wouldn't need it. It was only Plan D, after all. A, B, and C would all have to fail before it would be needed. He stared out the window at the passing fall scenery. The trees would be all bare in a matter of days, he could tell, black branches clutching at the autumn sky.

They passed houses with carved pumpkins on the doorsteps, grinning and gleaming from candles inside. A dime store had a window display of cut-out witches and black cats and Jack O' Lanterns. It was still daylight—though the sun was sinking—and Dipper glimpsed a few roving bands of young pointy-hatted clowns and wizards, little girls with bat-wing cloaks and one dressed, improbably, as a yellow chick hatching from an egg—her legs stuck through the bottom curve of it, and the shell hung from her shoulders on suspenders.

It looked bizarre, utterly alien, and at the same time familiar, reminding Dipper of past Halloweens when he and Mabel had been a pair of matching kitty-cats, or salt and pepper, and once a devil and an angel. He had been the angel.

"Have fun, kids," he murmured. He felt a little pang, because he and Mabel had always been especially close when out trick-or-treating. Too soon the time passed, too quickly the kids walked down the block, turned the corner, and left the October country behind them.

_If we—no. WHEN we get out of this, Mabel and I are going to have a good Halloween together._

He settled back in his seat. He could hear Angelique and Mabel behind him, talking together in that confidential, nearly whispering way that girls did, but he couldn't understand a word.

_Hang in there, he told himself. Stay on your toes. Be ready for anything._

He clutched the key in his pocket. _And hope it doesn't come down to Plan D._

* * *

 

**8 Interference**

Davies turned the Duesenberg around in the school parking lot, and Dipper noticed the black, boxy Model T already parked where the older Mabel had told him to expect it. Braking, Davies stopped the car and got out to open the back door for the girls. "Mr. Flannigan told me to return promptly at ten o'clock to return you home," he said. "I'll expect you to be ready, Miss."

"I know," Angelique said carelessly. "The dance will be over then, anyhow. We'll be here, Davies. We'll wait at the curb out in front of the gym under the light. That's all."

"Yes, Miss."

Dipper had opened his own door and had come around the back of the car. "Thank you for driving us," he said.

Looking a bit surprised, Davies said, "Of course, young sir. Is the building even open? We're early."

"It's open," Angelique said. "The decoration committee will be there, anyway. Come on."

She led them about fifty steps away and into the gymnasium, where crepe-paper orange and black streamers had been swagged overhead, leading up to three-dimensional hanging crepe-paper pumpkins a more ferocious orange than any real pumpkin could hope to achieve. All around the walls, cardboard cutouts of owls and bats flew escort for silhouettes of witches astride broomsticks. A woman teacher who had been chatting to a thick-set middle-aged man in a dark suit saw them and came over. "We're really not starting for another fifteen minutes," she said. "But you're welcome to sit here and wait." She pointed to a row of chairs along the wall.

"All right," Angelique said. "Oh, Mrs. Mallory, this is Mabel and Dipper Pines. They're from California and they're staying with us for a few days."

Mrs. Mallory, not elderly but perhaps prematurely gray, gave them a quick smile and nod, and they went to the chairs as she returned to the man teacher she had been talking to. "Come on, Mabel," Angelique said. "Bring the purse."

"Where are you going?" Dipper asked, a little apprehensively.

"To change," Angelique said. She led Mabel through an archway and turned left to the girls' room, and the two of them vanished inside.

Dipper sat and kept his gaze glued to the door—if Angelique came out through the archway and turned right, she'd be heading out of the gym, and he'd have to stop her, somehow. Plan E, maybe.

Minutes passed. He began to feel antsy, but then Chazz walked in, wearing a white shirt and black slacks, a gray cardigan sweater instead of a jacket, and a blue tie much too long for him. Dipper got up and met him. "Another five or six minutes," he said, answering the question in Chazz's eyes. "Angelique is changing dresses. Uh, I was in your class today."

"I remember you and your sister," Chazz told him. He shook Dipper's hand. "Uh—so is Angelique coming soon?"

"Angelique? She's here already," Dipper said, realizing that Chazz was so nervous what he had told him had gone right over his head. "She and my sister are in the girls' room—no, look, here they come."

Chazz turned and Dipper heard him catch his breath. Angelique had changed from the white dress to the scarlet one, and she walked with a definite, feline sway, a smile on her newly-painted red lips. In her confidence and poise, though not in looks, she reminded Dipper strongly of Pacifica.

Angelique came close and twirled, showing off. "Hi, Chazz. Dipper, how do I look?"

"Fantastic," Dipper said.

Chazz just said, "Wowee."

Angelique giggled. "Oh, look, people are showing up," she said as a laughing crowd of teens spilled through the gym doors. Across the wide floor a bandstand had been set up, and a little group of musicians had been tuning their instruments—a clarinet, a trumpet, a couple of saxes, an upright bass, a simple drum set, and two guys with ukuleles. Off to one side, a pianist sat at a baby grand. One of the guys with the ukes said something, and the group began a tune that sounded familiar to Dipper, though he couldn't quite put a title to it.

"That's an old song," Angelique complained.

"What is it?" Mabel asked.

Sounding surprised, both Angelique and Chazz said "'Sweet Georgia Brown!'" Then they looked at each other and smiled.

"Hey," Dipper said, "Look, a few people are dancing. Angelique, Chazz, why don't you show Mabel and me the steps? We, uh, we didn't get to dance much in California. We'll watch you and pick it up."

"I'm not a very good dancer," Chazz said. Mabel gave him a hard look, and he coughed, "But if you want to try it, Angelique, I know you're good, so I'll try to keep up."

"Why not?" Angelique said. "Only I hope they know some more hep stuff!"

They went out onto the floor, burst into wild gyrations, and Mabel said, "She wants to be about five years older than she is, I think."

"That's some dance," Dipper murmured. Oh, he'd seen Mabel do the Macarena, the Dougie, Gangnam Style, and even the wormy dance, and this one wasn't perhaps as off-beat as those, but it involved a lot of side-by-side high-stepping, an assortment of side-kicking, and a frenzy of waving their hands in the air.

"It's the Charleston, I think," Mabel said over the music.

"Didn't they do any slow dancing back in the 1920s?" Dipper asked.

"Mm-oh," Mabel said with a shrug. "I guess we'll find out." She grabbed his hand. "C'mon, Brobro, let's fit a carpet!"

"I think that's 'cut a rug,'" Dipper said, but he followed her and tried to match the moves that Angelique, dancing with wild abandon a few steps away, was doing. It put him about a beat behind the music, but from the looks of the other dancers, that didn't matter much.

Mabel, as usual, was doing the dance the Mabel way—meaning jumping jacks, pendulum-arms, head bobs, and rhythmic kicking. To Dipper's mild surprise, some guys who had been leaning against the wall straightened up and started clapping along in time to Mabel's calisthenics. "Hotcha!" one of them yelled. They all grinned appreciatively.

The music wound down, and Dipper, winded, walked off the floor and over to an empty spot on the wall. A boy asked Mabel for the next dance, and she agreed. The pianist took the lead, and the boy led Mabel into a dance that Dipper recognized—a fox trot—because Mabel had watched "Hey, America, Dance!" on TV and one of the competitions had been all about that step. She wasn't too shabby at it, but Chazz and Angelique were better.

When that one ended, Mabel, Angelique, and Chazz came walking over, laughing, and stopped at a table nearby for paper cups of punch. Dipper joined them. "You guys are good," he said.

"Guys?" asked Angelique, sounding offended. "What about us?"

"Oh, Angie," Mabel said, "in California, 'guys' means everybody, boys and girls alike."

"That sounds goofy to me," she said, but she was smiling.

"What was the tune?" Dipper asked. "The fox trot?"

"Another old one," Angelique complained. 'Horses.' I wish they'd play some new music!"

As if a genie had heard, her wish was granted. The band struck up another number and one of the ukulele players began to sing "Bye, By, Blackbird."

"That's pretty new!" Chazz said. "Want to—"

"Yes!" Angelique said, and they took to the dance floor again.

"Here, Brobro," Mabel said, handing Dipper a Dixie cup of pink lemonade. "I think we pulled it off! Here's to the Mystery Twins!"

"Huh," Dipper said. "I didn't know they'd invented paper cups in the 1920s." He tapped the rim of his cup against hers. "Mystery Twins!"

Outside, Mabel II and the older Pacifica waited in the Model T. "It's time," Pacifica said, checking her wristwatch.

"You're right," Mabel said. "I see the Stutz down the street."

The car was passing through the yellow cone of streetlight illumination. It was a dark maroon 1925 Stutz coupe with a rumble seat, and it was cruising slowly. Both women slouched down in their seats as the Stutz approached. The coupe turned in at the parking lot and double-parked right in front of the Model T, blocking it in. The guy who climbed out from behind the steering wheel was a hulking boy, built like a football player—which he had been until his grades made him ineligible. Then he had dropped out of school. This was Butch.

His two buddies, Creighton "Crash" Collins and Mike Kowalczyk, clambered out after him. "She gonna be here?" one of them, probably Crash, asked.

"Yeah," Butch said.

The third boy sounded uneasy: "Butch, this could land us in hot water. I mean, she's _somebody,_ she's the bank guy's kid—"

"And my uncle's the Deputy Chief of Police," Butch said. "What's the matter, Mikey? You turning yellow?"

"Aw, no, Butch," the third boy whined. "But you know you can't go in there. Old man Larraby always watches the doors, and he knows you ditched school."

"Which is why you're goin' in to get her, Mikey," Butch said. "You're still in school."

"Yeah, but—"

Butch cut him off: "The girl's curious. She ain't never been to a jazz party. I'm gonna show her what it's all about."

"Yeah," Mike persisted, "but she don't know how rough a joint Harry's is, and I'll bet she don't know she'll be the only regular girl there—"

Crash punched his shoulder. "Wise up," he said. "How's she gonna be any good to Butch without she gets a little encouragement from Harry's hookers?"

"Yellow," Butch said with a sneer.

"Naw, I'm not," Mike said. "It's just—we could land in big trouble."

"Nix on that. You just get her outside the building, and then you can go your merry way. You don't gotta go to the party with us." Butch pounded his right fist into his left palm a couple of times. "Do I gotta persuade you?"

"No, no, I'll go get her." Mike hesitated. "You mean it? Once she gets outside, it's Jake for me to go?"

"Go, stay, what do I care?" Butch said. "I just want the girl."

"OK, OK, I'm going," Mike said. "Hey, before I do, gimme a fag, OK? Calm my nerves a little."

The three went to the deep shadows under a tree—the sun was down and the October night was coming on fast—and from their seat in the Model T, Mabel II and Pacifica saw the flare of a match.

"Three on a match," Pacifica said. "That means bad luck, right?"

"I dunno. Never smoked, never wanted to."

"OK, this time Chazz is here at the dance," Pacifica murmured nervously. "Maybe that'll scare Mike off. If she doesn't come out in seven and a half minutes, they won't make it to the railroad crossing when the train roars through, and there'll be no crash."

"We can't let her go with these boys even if she comes out late," Mabel insisted. "What Butch has planned for her maybe won't kill her outright, but it'll ruin her life."

"We don't know for sure. Maybe it'll work out." Pacifica sighed. "You know, she really needs her sister."

"If she can hang on until December, she'll get her. We've run the simulations. You know her sister's going to leave Vassar and come home."

Pacifica whispered, "But if Angelique gets to that party and Butch gets her drunk—"

"Yeah, then even December will be too late for her."

"We could block the drive. I think there's room."

Mabel sighed. "No direct interference from TPAES. You know what Blendin said. We can't personally interact with these guys to keep Angelique and Butch apart. Major paradoxes. We couldn't even get Mabel and Dipper back to their own time line if we did that."

"I know, I know—look, somebody threw down a cigarette."

Mabel peered through the darkness. "Mike. He's heading into the gym. The other two guys aren't looking this way. Let's go. You made the call for Plan B?"

"Yes. They should show up pretty soon. Quiet, now."

The women opened the doors of the Model T and then shut them silently as they stepped down. They had already picked an observation point across the street from the school, and they walked to the far side of the parking lot, keeping cars between them and Butch and Crash. Then they crossed the quiet street, empty except for little bunches of trick-or-treaters two blocks down, and came back along the other side, turning to walk across the lawn of a darkened house to a bench that had some cover from a hedge. They sat side by side.

"Two more minutes," Pacifica said. "You're sure the people who own this house—"

"They won't be back until nearly midnight. Nobody will spot us."

They waited.

"Only twenty seconds," Pacifica said. "I think we did it."

"No," Mabel II said in a dull voice. "I see her in the doorway. There she is. They got her."

* * *

 

**9 Chase**

The band was playing "Ain't She Sweet," and most of the high-schoolers were dancing. Dipper, standing against the wall, found it hard to keep Angelique in view. She was dancing with a tall guy on the far side of the gym floor, while Mabel and Chazz took a turn closer to him. Mabel had picked up the steps and was doing at least as well as the average girl on the floor.

Dipper got another cup of punch. The chunk of ice was melting rapidly in it, and it was watery, but at least it was something cool. He was sweating.

One thing that the 2000s had that the 1920s lacked was air conditioning. With the crowd of active teens and the last heat of an Indian Summer evening, the gym had become uncomfortably warm and humid.

True, the wide double front doors stood wide open, and high in the opposite wall a big circular fan whirled, but the sluggish breeze coming in from outside did little to reduce the temperature. Finishing the punch and tossing the cup, Dipper went to the boys' room to splash cold water on his face.

Some guys were hanging out there, and he could smell tobacco smoke. He fleetingly wondered how anybody survived the twenties—he'd noticed that almost every adult he'd seen on the street had a cigarette or cigar between their lips.

When he came out of the restroom, he looked again for Angelique—but couldn't see her anywhere. The dance was just ending, and he caught up with Mabel as, flushed and gleaming with perspiration, she came off the floor. "Where is she?" he asked.

"Huh? Angelique?" Mabel glanced frantically all around. "Weren't you watching her?"

"I was, but—"

From outside came a piercing shriek.

"Come on!" Dipper yelled, running toward the door. "Get Chazz!"

He sprinted out of the gym, down the concrete steps, and turned toward the parking lot. He saw Angelique in her red dress then—in the light of a streetlamp, two guys were forcing her into a car, and a big heavy driver was urging them: "Shove her in!"

The smallest of the three boys got her in the front seat of the car, then climbed in beside her and slammed the door as the third jumped up into an odd little back seat behind the car roof. Mabel came running up with Chazz in tow.

"Let me out!" Angelique screamed, and Chazz took the lead as they rushed toward the car.

But the driver started it, backed, then with a yelp of rubber on asphalt, he wrenched the car into the street and made a hard left.

"The T-Model!" Dipper yelled, pointing. He dug the key from his pocket. "Here, you drive it!"

Chazz didn't question, but grabbed the key. Dipper jumped into the front passenger seat, and Mabel climbed into the back. "Hurry! They're getting away!"

Chazz turned the key and stamped on the starter. The engine chugged to life. "Hang on!"

Because of the way the car had been parked, he didn't need to back out. He made the turn onto the street and followed the receding tail lights of the other car. "It's a Stutz," he said. "Only guy I know who drives one is Butch Elgrin. He's a bad egg."

"He's turning right!" Mabel yelled.

"I see him!"

Dipper, nervous without a seatbelt, was hanging on to the door. The Ford wasn't going all that fast—maybe fifty—but it was open, the wind was blasting in, and to him, it seemed as fragile as a kiddy car.

"Whoa!" Chazz swerved wildly to avoid a little group of three kids in costumes, still out trick-or-treating after dark and not careful about where they crossed the street. One of them yelled an insult as the Ford, with two wheels on the opposite sidewalk, narrowly missed them. The tires thudded back to the pavement.

An oncoming car blared its horn, and they passed it with uncomfortably little room to spare. "I see them!" Dipper said, pointing. "They just made a left turn!"

"Heading out of town," Chazz said. "Probably taking either Route 20 or 42!"

They skidded around in the tight turn. Dipper saw they had gained on the Stutz—not by much, but they were closer. The car ahead made another screeching left turn.

"Route 42, south!" Chazz said, following them. "Heading toward Chicago."

The car ahead suddenly sped up.

"They saw us," Dipper said. "They know we're chasing them."

"Hang on. I know where I can take a shortcut if they don't turn off the highway."

A quarter of a mile along, Chazz veered to the left. "Route 42 curves," he said. "This is straighter. If I can keep up speed on the side road, I may be able to cut them off!"

The road was badly paved and bumped and jostled the Ford, rattling Dipper's teeth. They didn't quite cut off the Stutz, but when Chazz pulled back onto Route 42 again, they were just a car-length behind it. It passed a slower car, and Chazz followed on his tail. The car they passed honked angrily.

"He's crazy!" Mabel yelled from the back.

"You're right," Chazz called back. "He got dumped from school for failing grades and fighting!"

"I see Angelique," Dipper said as the car ahead passed under the light from a billboard. "She's struggling with the guy next to her!"

"Yeah, I saw him. That's Mike somebody," Chazz said. "One of Butch's crowd. He's the weak sister of the three. What's he doing!"

Butch had skidded off on an unpaved side road, the Stutz lurching alarmingly and sending up a cloud of dust. Chazz had to slow a little to make the turn and lost some ground.

Now they were on a narrow, rutted dirt road, the Stutz ahead of them raising a roiling, blinding cloud of brown dust that bleared the Ford's headlights. A farm truck ahead ran out of the road as the Stutz thundered toward it, and Chazz swerved to avoid it.

"Railroad tracks!" Mabel yelled.

The rail line ran right beside the dirt road. Far ahead, just to the right of the dirt road, Dipper saw a brilliant round headlamp fast approaching. "Train! Train!"

"I see it," Chazz said. "I think he's trying to beat it to the crossing!"

"Cut him off, cut him off!" Mabel yelled.

"I'm trying!"

Chazz floored the accelerator. The Ford surged and he pulled alongside the Stutz. Dipper saw the big guy at the wheel glaring at him. He heard the wail of an old-fashioned siren and the screech of a train whistle. Butch spat a curse.

"Hold it steady!" Dipper yelled, opening the passenger door.

Mabel yelled, "Dipper, don't you dare—"

Too late. From the running board of the Ford, Dipper launched himself sideways—

Hooked an arm through the window of the Stutz, nearly falling from the other car's running board—

Butch had started to turn the wheel right, aiming to cross the train tracks, insanely close to the oncoming train—

Dipper got a hand on the steering wheel. With his left hand, Butch grabbed Dipper's wrist and nearly jerked it away.

Yelling, Dipper felt a surge of electricity rip through him. Blue lightning forked through the car, making Butch scream and let go of both Dipper's hand and the steering wheel.

_Thank you, Mr. Electrician!_

Immediately, Dipper wrenched it to the left as hard as he could—

The train was there, on top of them! But the car responded. The tires growled and shrieked as the turning Stutz narrowly avoided the hurtling locomotive—

At least one of the tires blew, and the crippled car spun in a crazy circle.

Dipper lost his footing and tumbled, rolling on the ground, feeling the whoosh of gritty air as the train cars rushed and roared only a foot or two away—

Someone was screaming.

* * *

 

 

**10 Consequences**

The light was dim—the cars' headlights sent angled beams in different directions, and a weak incandescent bulb shone over the gas pumps in front of a country store fifty yards down the road—but in the swirling dust, Dipper saw everyone was outside of the cars. The Stutz lay in the ditch, canted at an angle, and beside it the middle-sized thug held onto a kicking, yelling Angelique while Mabel danced around slapping at him.

The other two guys, the big one and the one Chazz had called Mike, had ganged up on Chazz. "Hold him!" Butch yelled as Chazz flailed away and Mike tried to grab his arms. Dipper saw that Butch held something, a stick, a short club, and anger boiled inside him. He ran forward. Chazz spun and landed a punch right in Mike's face, sending the thin boy reeling back into the ditch. Butch, murder in his eyes, stepped forward, drew back to slug Chazz with the weapon—and grunted in surprise when Dipper grabbed his arm.

He tried to shake Dipper loose, but Dipper clung on with his left hand and hit him hard in the stomach with his right, making the air _oof_ out of him. "Come help me!" Butch bawled. Mike didn't respond—he was sitting hunched over on the ground with a hand cupped over his nose—but the middle-sized one let go of Angelique and came blundering over.

Chazz spun on his heel and slugged him, sending him staggering.

"Two on one! No fair!" Butch shrieked.

And the headlights of a slowing car shone on them all. Brakes creaked.

"Break it up!" The no-nonsense voice came from a uniformed man stepping from behind the wheel of the police car.

An elderly voice came from the other side of the Stutz: "Officer, I saw it all. That's my store down there. Three of these boys were manhandling a girl!"

"That would be Angelique Flannigan!" Mabel said. "Here she is!"

"All right, all right, stand over here, ladies. Now who's who?" the policeman said.

Butch blustered, "These guys jumped me—"

"He's a liar!" Chazz snapped. "Angelique, are you OK?"

"I think so."

"The big one's got a billy club," the old man's voice said.

"Drop it," the policeman said, striding forward.

"My uncle's the Deputy Chief!" Butch growled. "You're about to get in big trouble!"

"I doubt it." Another man had climbed from the passenger seat of the police car. "I'm the Chief of Police!" He went straight to Mike, who was still sitting bent over. "I know you, Kowalcyk. What happened, punk?"

His voice was unclear because of his smashed nose, but Mike said, "Butch said he wanted to get Angelique drunk and—"

"You dirty fink!" Butch raised the club as if he were going to throw it at Mike, but the cop slammed down his own nightstick hard, cracking it against that wrist, and with a yowl Butch dropped the weapon. Dipper stepped on it and kept his foot pressed down. It was a sawed-off baseball bat, he realized, its business end swathed with electrician's tape.

"Where's the other one?" the Chief asked.

"It's Crash Collins," Mike said, his voice blurry. "Hep be! My dose id bleeding!"

"He run," the older voice said. "Down the tracks, back toward town."

"We know where he lives," the Chief said. "Oswald, your mom's brother won't get you out of this. You've been warned plenty. This time they'll throw the book. You're not a kid any longer, and kidnapping's a felony."

"My uncle—"

"Girl's dad's a bank manager. I think that trumps a Deputy Chief," the policeman said. "Mister, you got a telephone in that store?"

"Yes, sir, sure do!"

"Call the police station and tell Landvick to send two cars out here. Get a tow truck for the Stutz, too. That's Sergeant Landvick, he's the one who'll answer the phone."

"Yes, sir. Here comes somebody else, though."

Dipper looked around. Another old-timey car had pulled off the dirt road behind the police car—he didn't know makes and models, and not even the information he'd gained from Wendy, who was a bit of a mechanic, helped him out. He was surprised—not much, but still—when the adult Pacifica got out. "Chief Alverson?"

"Yes, Miss, that's me."

"I'm with Children's Services. Two of these young people are in my charge. That boy and his sister, over there in the white dress. May I take them?"

"I'll need to get statements from them."

"I'm going to the Finnigans' house. If you like, I can take Angelique as well."

"And Chazz," Angelique said.

"Well, ma'am, they can drive there in—uh. Wasn't there a Ford around here?"

"I didn't see no Ford," the old man said.

Dipper blinked. There had been a Ford, or . . . had there? _Time's going screwy. TPAES at work._

The policeman seemed to phase in and out mentally for a moment, then said, "Well—yeah, I guess taking them back home would be OK. I'll come around tomorrow morning to take their statements."

"Get in, please," Pacifica said, walking back and opening the doors of the car. Dipper and Mabel squeezed into the front seat. Chazz and Angelique got in back. "No questions," Pacifica said primly as she started the engine.

The drive back to town was nearly silent, except for soft murmurs from the back seat. Pacifica stopped in front of Angelique's house. "Chazz, you and Angelique go inside and tell her folks what happened. Tell them everything."

They waited at the curb until the couple had vanished.

Then Mabel said, "I still have her other dress!"

"No, you don't," Pacifica said. "You didn't notice, but she was wearing the original dress when she went inside. The red one's back in the box, good as new."

"What? But she—she didn't change," Mabel protested.

"Time Squad voodoo," Dipper said.

"You are so smart." Pacifica started the car. "By tomorrow they won't remember that you two were ever here, nor will anyone else. Chazz will be the hero—as far as he or Butch or any of them will ever know, he jumped on the running board of Butch's car and clung on the whole way until they got to the railroad crossing, then he managed to force Butch to stop and held them off until the police got there."

"But without us—"

"Something really bad would have happened. That's why we brought you into this. We knew Chazz and Angelique needed more help than was available to them in real time. Speaking of time, come on, we're running out of it." She stopped the car in an alley, and they all got out, with difficulty—the space was narrow. They squeezed past, following her. Dipper glanced back around. The car was gone.

"This looks weird, but just follow me." Pacifica walked through a brick wall.

Mabel and Dipper held hands and did the same.

Mabel II waited inside, suited up in her TPAES uniform. "I was starting to think you'd be late!"

"Just in time. The police chief went out with the squad car."

"I used Flannigan's name when I made the anonymous call," Mabel II said. "OK, this is going to be a little unsettling. Five, four, three, two—"

FLASH.

When the mists cleared, Mabel said, "I think we've been here before—Globnar!"

They stood in a glass-walled cubicle, and beyond it a sort of arena could be seen—though no contestants engaged in struggle there.

"No Globnar in this time line," Mabel II said. "Because Time Baby didn't get regenerated here. He's reassembling himself, and it'll take another seven hundred years or so. And he's going to be so cranky!"

Mabel looked baffled. "But—we—I mean, Blendin came back and got us and we figured a way—"

"Th-th-that's right," said a familiar voice. Blendin stood behind them. "I-I-I did get you to h-h-help trick Bill Cipher in your own time. B-b-but h-here I didn't think of that. I was the o-o-only TPAES officer left. So I-I-I've recruited a d-dozen more and got the squad operational again. I'm h-holding things together until Time Baby can come b-back."

"You're gonna hold on for a thousand years?" Mabel asked. "What are you, immortal?"

"I-I-I resent that! I-I'm very well behaved!"

"Boss," Mabel II said, "she said _immortal._ With a T."

"Oh. Oh, I see. Well, we don't know if we're immortal or not, but we do operate outside of T-t-time m-most of the t-time. So we don't r-really age all that f-fast. For instance, these two agents are th-thirty years old, b-but this is the y-year 2314 according to y-your time calendar."

"Nice perk," Mabel said, winking at her older self.

"All right," Pacifica said. "Our report, Boss: Mission accomplished, but it was close. Mabes, get the reading up."

"Say what?" Mabel asked.

"I'm on it," Mabel II replied. She worked at what seemed to be a holovision computer, studying readouts. "All right! Angelique and her sister got back together that December. The sister stayed in Greentown and went to the local college."

"And Chazz married Angelique!" Mabel said.

"Um—no. But they were good friends, and he got over his infatuation with her, and he did marry and he became a pretty famous writer. He and his wife had four children and one of them—yes! Grew up to do what needed to be done. Dipper lived."

"Wait, what?" Dipper asked. "I _died_?"

"In this time line, when you were almost twenty. Not now, though," Pacifica said. "It's changed now."

"But—what was this all about?"

"We c-can't t-tell you," Blendin said. "That's a time secret!"

Still at the computer, Mabel II said, "Angelique got married to a nice guy and had a great life. Oh, look—the Finnigans and the Reicharts did follow the investment advice they got in the letters we forged! They both rode out the Depression in comfort."

"Money does help," Pacifica said.

"So—all that's left is to send you guys back to your own time line," Mabel II said.

"Wait, wait," Dipper said, waving his arms. "Are we going to remember this?"

Pacifica and Mabel II looked at each other.

Blendin said, "S-sort of. You won't have much time detail in your m-memories, though. And there's s-still a time loose end you'll have to s-settle, b-because to get your time help, we had to involve the t-two of you. There'll be a kind of t-time echo when you go to your s-school dance."

"What?" Mabel asked.

"You'll know it," Blendin said, "when you s-see it."

"We're in a time bubble here," Pacifica told them. "When you leave, various things are going to happen here and in the past. You won't know about any of it. I'm sorry, but it has to be that way."

Mabel II hugged Dipper and Mabel. "Don't worry. It's going to be fine!"

"I'm initiating the time sequence," Blendin said from the holocomputer.

"Future Mabel!" Mabel yelled. "Time Baby! Calm him down with tummy buzzes!"

Blendin Blandin threw a switch. "So long, Mabel and Dipper. I'll s-see you again. In time!"

* * *

 

**_And in time-line B, in the year 2019:_ **

Dipper reeled falling backward from the rampaging monster, but someone caught him and dragged him through an opening. The door slammed. A moment later, a devastating explosion shook the whole building. "Wow!" the nineteen-year-old boy, said, getting to his feet. "That was close! Pacifica?"

She was disheveled, her clothing torn, and her bottom lip was bleeding a little. "Are you all right?" she asked urgently. "I was so scared!"

"Y-yeah, I'm fine," Dipper said. "I wonder if that blast sent the Pain Monger back to its own dimension."

Mabel came running up, waving a strange device. "It did! Readings are clear! Way to go, Brobro!" she said. "But that was a big chance to take. You could've died!"

"Pacifica pulled me out just before it went off," Dipper said. He hugged Pacifica. "Thank you."

"I had to do it," Pacifica said, hugging him back. She bit her bloody lip, then added, "Because I _love_ you, dummy!"

"Oh," Dipper said, blinking, looking into her eyes. He brushed a strand of blonde hair from her face and stroked her cheek. I—well, you know—I guess I—"

"Kiss her, you rapscallion!" Mabel said.

It was the first of thousands.

* * *

 

_**And in time-line B-1, in the year 2030:** _

"S-so that's the s-story," Blendin stammered. "I've got the tech working again, but I need more agents. If you w-want, you can all join. The p-pay's not much, but you'll live practically f-f-f-f, for a long, long time!"

Mr. and Mrs. Mason Pines looked at each other. Pacifica nodded and smiled. "OK, Blendin," Dipper said. "We're in!"

"Me too!" Mabel said. "The Time Twins! And Pacifica!" She did a victorious time air-punch.

It was the first of thousands.

* * *

 

_**And in time line A, on Halloween night in the year 2014:** _

"These aren't the costumes we planned to wear," Dipper said. "Where the heck did you get them?"

"Don't know," Mabel admitted. "They just showed up in my room."

The costumes were attracting a lot of attention, anyway. The twins were decked out as TPAES agents—though, to Mabel's extreme disappointment, the time tapes and zap guns were non-operational. She'd tried.

But even so, they won the award for Best Ensemble Costume. Mabel danced a good many times, with half a dozen boys, and Dipper danced once with his lab partner, Eileen. But then, as the party wound down, a masked girl came walking to him through the crowd—a pretty blonde girl with tightly-curled hair, wearing a red flapper dress and a big, wide smile.

"Uh, hi?" Dipper said, wondering why she looked familiar.

She didn't say a word, but stretched out her hand. He took it. She gently pulled him out onto the floor.

The DJ began to play a really weird tune—"Varsity Drag," a moldy relic of the previous century. He looked at his sound board in utter confusion.

Nobody else was dancing. Who knew how to dance to that crazy music?

Dipper . . . found he somehow did. Sort of. He and the blonde girl had the floor to themselves, a guy in a futuristic outfit, a girl in antique clothing. They did the wild side-stepping, hand-waving, high-kicking moves. The girl was smiling. The crowd started to laugh and clap along.

Mabel was taking pictures with her phone.

The DJ got the board under control, and the last dance he played was a slow one, a waltz. Dipper had learned that one. He took the blonde girl in his arms, she leaned her cheek on his shoulder, and they danced out the evening. She didn't say one word.

Then as the crowd began to break up, she led him outside the gymnasium of Piedmont High. She kissed his cheek. And as she walked away in the silvery light of a waxing moon, she . . . simply faded out. Became transparent. Vanished.

"Who _was_ that, Dipper?" Mabel asked at his side.

"I—I'm not sure," Dipper said slowly. "I think maybe it was the ghost of the girl who owned that red dress you bought at the sale. Remember?"

"Yeah," Mabel said in a thoughtful voice. "Kinda. But—she didn't look like a ghost."

"No, she felt real in my arms," Dipper said. He shrugged. "Who knows. Maybe she was an angel."

And who knows?

Maybe she was.

* * *

 

_The End_


End file.
